Be Like Mike Malinowski of EHD Insurance Agency

Sometimes I dream that he is me. You got to see that's how I dream to be like Mike. If I could be like Mike. On today's Agent Leader podcast, I interview Mike Malinowski of EHD Insurance. And you'll see why you and your agency should be like Mike and what they've done in their sales culture and how they train and develop their number one asset, their people. Enjoy the podcast. Welcome to the Agent Leader Podcast. My name is Brent Kelly. I am your host. I'm excited to be with you today and I have an exceptional guest. And if you're watching on YouTube or on video, you can see us as we are in the windows right now. Mike Malinowski, who's the president and CEO of EHD Insurance, will be joining us. I'll make sure Mike gets a formal introduction here in a minute, but excited to have Mike on. I know he'll share some great ideas, struggles, challenges, successes that they've had as a very successful agency and his role as President and CEO. Also want to remind you the purpose of this podcast is always to help educate, empower and equip you, the independent insurance agency leader, to become your best version possible. And as a reminder, I've mentioned this on other podcasts, the best version possible fast track a 90 day process and plan for your agency is officially being rolled out in January. So I'll say this ahead of time before I introduce Mike. If you want to be like Mike, sorry Mike, I couldn't resist. And, and work with us as an organization. The Fast Track is a great way to get started. It's a 90 day process and then from there you can decide what you want to do to move forward. So go to sitkins.com fast track to learn more. Now with that, I want to get into today's podcast and my incredible guest. I mentioned Mike Malinowski with EHD Insurance. Mike, welcome to the Agent Leader podcast.

Thank you Brent. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Awesome. Well, again there's a lot of things we're going to touch on today and you as an agency have, have been with us as a partner and we love the relationship for five plus years now looking back of our work together. So it's been a while and obviously lots of learning on both sides and growth along the way and all the challenges and things that you're going through. So can't wait for you to share some of that before we get into some of the the challenges and successes just for the audience. Mike, if you could give a little background or Bio on certainly your role and how you got to your role and as well as EHD as an organization.

Oh, thanks, Brent. Well, yeah, I've been in the insurance business after graduating college since 1995. Started with the carrier, and through that I worked a little bit with government, and that's how I met EHD. So been with EHD for 18 years. I started off as a producer, you know, out doing the things that producers do. I learned the business from the ground up, and it's been a great experience, a great company, great culture. And right after, you know, six months being here, I knew this is a place I wanted to grow and continue to grow with. So, yeah, as an agency, we're. We're doing pretty well. We were very proud of still being privately held and independently owned. That's. That's a big, you know, point of differentiation for us. How's that sound? Grand for a pod for us. So we like that. And, you know, we're in our 127th year in. In business. So, you know, here in pretty much a Commonwealth, Pennsylvania, we used to look at ourselves kind of as regional offices, but now we look at ourselves pretty much as, you know, a large regional broker throughout the whole Commonwealth, and not just, you know, in particular areas of the state. So, you know, we surpassed, you know, 30 million last year. So we're pretty proud of that, continuing to grow, hopefully to 40 and 50 million and keep this train rolling. So, you know, do the full gamut of benefits. Largest 68% of our business, property casualty benefits and personal lines. So it's been great for us to continue to, you know, just do what we do, have fun doing it, and really help clients and customers. It's. It's important because, you know, the old corny saying is premium's only important the day you pay it. But actually helping customers and business owners through what's been rough times over the last several years has been a great differentiator for us. And we do, we take great pride in it. So it's. It's been a blessing for us as an agency to be so involved in our community. So hopefully we can keep this thing going.

Yeah. Thanks, Mike. And, you know, I'll just say this. You know, I've been out your place several times now, different events and, and obviously some of the trainings that we've done. But, you know, we talk about at Sitkins, you know, culture. What is culture? Well, it's the language and behaviors that are normal in your agency and, and no agency culture is perfect. I know, Mike. You and you're always trying to improve and grow the culture in positive ways. But I'll say it's one thing you mentioned that you know, when you were there six months, like hey, this is the place I want to be. There's something really special about EHD and what you guys do. And you can just see it in the, feel it when you're, when you're in the building, around the people. So I want to applaud you certainly for you. I know it wasn't, wasn't just you, Mike, but as an entire organization, what you've all done to establish that culture. Now, now that I said all that positive stuff, I'm going to ask you the challenge question. This is the first question I always ask my guests, you know, listen, and we could probably be here all day about, hey Mike, share some challenges you're facing as an agency. There's many, but if you could certainly in today's climate, right, and we're all dealing with different stuff with market conditions and everything else going on. We know that. I'm curious just from your perspective Mike, what do you believe are some of the biggest challenges that EHD is facing today and what are you doing to address those?

Yeah, well that's a great question. I mean from a corporate level, I guess, you know, perpetuation is always the number one challenge. To be able to meet our obligations to prior shareholders and perpetuate the company long term and doing that long range planning, which is this day and age when you have a hundred year pandemic, you have this type of inflation. It's tough, right? It's really tough. And to continue to concentrate then on the day to day blocking and tackling stuff of writing and retaining customers, you know, and, and the pipeline, and continuing to develop the pipeline to find the right talent as every agency I think is looking at and how we continue to focus on, on recruiting the right people to the agency and we're. Our hiring process can, can be lengthy and there's a reason for that because we want to pick the right people and that can create some challenges for us. But you know, that's probably one of our most challenging thing is just you know, if we want to continue to meet our growth goals, our sales velocity goals and things of that nature, we got to find the right talent and develop them and train them. And not just, you know, when I started you got a pencil and said go write. You know, business, it's how we help the younger generation. There's such a huge opportunity for the younger generation to get into our business. And we're really trying to attack that through several measures, but perpetuating and stuff. We talk to you about Brent all the time. Pipeline development. Pipeline development. And you know, it's a hard business. You got to work hard. I put that in every single email I think is, you know, you got to work hard and the right stuff will come. But we'll continue to try to address those challenges and develop our people both organically and try to find some people out there that want to come to a privately held agency.

Yeah, yeah, Mike, that's a great point. You know, we talk about all the time, I mean, and, and with, with leaders out there. I mean, hopefully this isn't cliche, but many cases you're not even in the insurance business. You really are in the people development business. And obviously those, those things overlap. But it's, you know, it's one of those things that's not an easy thing to do. And you know, my, my joke, Mike, which isn't a very good joke, is that, you know, leadership would be really easy if it wasn't for the darn people.

Right.

You know, because again, there's different backgrounds and experiences and all that. And again, certainly, you know, like I said, you go through a pandemic.

Right.

There's a lot of challenges with that and how do we reestablish culture and all those things. But I guess part of this too, Mike, when you're talking about people development, and I think it hits me, maybe this, I don't. This analogy will relate to you or not. I may have mentioned it before in different discussions we've had, but it's a lot like college recruiting today, in my opinion. You know, and I know you just said you were out and you were in State College. Right. With Penn State just recently. But they're pretty big sized programs, certainly. But you just think in general terms about, you know, college, you know, college athletics. You got to recruit. And now with, with nil, certainly there's, there's money factors involved, just like you're dealing with, with talent and you've got the transfer port. So it's not about just getting people in and get, you know, but then it's developing them and retaining them. And again, this may be a pretty wide open question, but I'm just curious, like, what things maybe have you done as an organization EHD to help in those ways? Cause it's not easy. People are trying to get the same talent you are and they're trying to pick off some of the talent that You've grown.

Yeah. I think, Brent, we've probably talked about this is almost as we look at clients like future ideal clients. We need to look at recruiting the same way. Just as you mentioned, as a college program needs to recruit it. Sometimes I think of the leadership group, we're so concentrated on the numbers and the day to day stuff where we talk about behaviors. Right. So we should have those same behaviors when we're going out to recruit folks. And quite frankly, the one thing that we were lacking on and we're trying to address is we never had a formal internship program. So we just started that. And to tell you, we had our first internship program. And guess what? We're hiring the kid who's graduating, by the way, from state college in December, who's going to walk into a sales role, who was with us through our first internship program. So that's one of the ways we're trying to address it. We did experiment with the Producer Academy internally. We had three recent college grads go through that. So we're really trying to concentrate on some organic ways to develop the folks through the internship program that. But you're right, we have, you know, we always worry about some of our best producers, how we lock them up, make them feel comfortable so they're not flying ship, going through the transfer portal, because everyone's looking just like we always say, right. Your best client is someone else's best prospect. Your best producer is someone else to come in offering more money. So you have to make sure you're creating a culture and rewarding them for their hard work. So, yeah, I think that's, you know, a challenge in this day and age that we'll have to continue to deal with. But as I said, and you mentioned just continuing to try to attract the younger generation to get, you know, who I think from a technology and all the things they do can really provide some value to business owners and customers. That's what's most important.

Yeah, it's. It certainly is that awareness. And, you know, a lot of this, you know, too, Mike. And you're talking about, you know, and we're talking about the college, college example there, but there is so much truth to that. And I think, you know, going back to the culture world, it's interesting. I just was looking at some studies, um, and there was a couple different studies, so I don't remember the exact numbers, but, you know, somewhere around a third of millennials. And again, millennials is the primary portion of the workforce. Of course, now we're getting into generation, you know, Z, I think that's the next one. I can't keep track of it anymore, quite frankly. Mike. But anyway, they were just talking about as far as benefits, and, you know, they. They really do. There's a substantial amount of millennials in the next generation behind that that are saying, hey, the thing that I'm really looking for is growth and development. Who can help provide some of that, right? That feeling I want to be somewhere where I can grow and develop. Of course, there's some that probably don't want to do that, but you don't want them anyway, so. But. But of the ones you want, it's like, hey, listen, you know, the question I was asking agencies is if someone came to you and said, listen, how. How will I get better? What are my development, growth opportunities in the next year? And maybe someone's offering more money, but they know there's a better, longer path, right, With. With another organization like ehd. So I think that's fantastic. I want to flip a little bit. Obviously, we talked about the challenges, but you've had some great successes, too.