Click #7 - Winging It to Proven Processes

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Welcome to the Agent Leader Podcast. My name is Brent Kelly, your host. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode. And the purpose of the Agent Leader podcast, as always, is to help you, the agency leader, gain clarity, build consistency and to make a commitment. A commitment to what? To become your best version possible. And you know, the whole idea of best version possible that we talk about at Sitkins Group, it started off as a really important question, what is the best version possible? And then it turned into this book that we wrote with my co host guest here, Roger Sitkins, the best version possible book. And yes, Roger Sitkins is with me today for our seventh click. And now it's turned into the best version possible experience, which you'll hear more about in the coming weeks of a proven process that's going to help your agency truly transform by simplifying, simplifying, let me say it, simplifying some of the complexities that you're facing to give you a proven process of results. So we're excited to share more about that coming out. If you do want to get a copy of the book, you can go to sitkins.com sitkins.com BVP for best version possible. I'd love for you get a copy or hey, get two or three and share with your other agency friends, your team members to all learn, grow to learn and grow together. So with that, I want to get into. This is our seventh, seventh click of eight. So if you've been listening in and you've been following along, thank you. First of all, you know, we, Roger Sitkins and I, and I'll give Roger a brief introduction, although you probably know him pretty well by this point.

I would think so.

I would hope so. I think, you know, you've been on all these clicks with me and I again, I appreciate that. But we were talking prior to launching this series and saying, you know, really where agencies need to get a start in some of these things is just these, these clicks, these breakthroughs. And we've shared a number of clicks in previous episodes on key areas. And this one, I'm not going to say it's my favorite. It might be my favorite. I don't know, but we'll see. But of all the clicks that we have, this one is so important. It's this click of going from winging it. I mean, winging it. Like, I don't know, we all just do stuff and it works and we'll talk more about what that means to having a true playbook or having a true process. Right. So it's winging it to having a playbook. And the easiest example I can give Roger, and sports analogies are my favorite, it's like going out to the old football field and 11 people go out there and they huddle around the quarterback or they get in a circle and, and they all look at each other and they say, what do you want to do? I don't know. What are you going to do? I don't know. Well, how about we all just do stuff and eventually we'll, we'll figure it out, right? Versus saying, hey, listen, we have roles, we have responsibilities, and we have a proven process or at least a design process of how we're going to get this ball down the field to the end zone, right? And the truth of it is, if ages and you know, we've said it a bunch of times, these clicks, you could not do any of the stuff we're talking about. You could truly wing. It might be all right, but is that really what you want? Right? Do you want to have the no playbook, no process, which basically is hysterical activity, or would you like to move into a playbook? So, Roger, I'm going to start off very open on my first question. Just say this. Why is this so darn important for agencies?

Oh boy. Well, something I only talk about 87.9% of the time. If you don't have an awareness that you're winging it, be very aware that you're going to have a lot of regrets at the end of your career that you're going to realize you never accomplished what you really wanted to accomplish. Because so many people, they wing it and they're semi successful term we use all the time, unfortunately. And they're doing pretty good. And they don't realize that, you know what, tomorrow's not the day you're going to wait. You know, they say, well, maybe we can do it tomorrow, maybe we can do it tomorrow. And one of my favorite sayings, because I made it up, is that yesterday becomes tomorrow unless you do something different today. Oh, yesterday comes tomorrow, something different today. I'll say the third time because I. Okay, yesterday becomes tomorrow if we don't do something different today. And so many people go, we're so busy now, we'll get to it when we can't. And this is the old tongue in cheek thing about someday aisle is not a day of the week. And so when they're winging it, getting semi successful results, but they realize that there's a lot of stress involved with that. Again, use the Analogy of there's no playbook. I told you a little while ago that I actually stumbled across my playbook from college for football that I still had. And it's about 100 pages, and it was amazing. And that was just the offense. I didn't get a defensive book that year. So when you look at this and you say, do we have a playbook? And someone used the analogy the other day, too. They said, coach, that's like having an orchestra where either they don't have the music sheets or everybody's got a different sheet. And that's really what happens as an agency is we. Maybe we're playing the same song, but the lyrics are wrong and the notes are wrong. So it just creates this stress, this uneasiness. It's tough to train people if you don't have a playbook. Okay? You can't train and develop your staff. There's no congruency in the way they do business. So if you're a producer dealing with two or three service reps, which happens at a lot of agencies, well, first of all, they probably have two or three producers, too. So they don't know how the producers want things done. You don't know how the service person wants them done. And if you're an agency principal at the top, where that crap moves uphill and gets to you eventually, where you're dealing with it. And it just comes down to they don't have their agency's way of doing business. They don't have, as we talk about all the time, a business model. Although we said on our last click and said it several times, that your current business model is perfectly designed for you to achieve the results you're currently achieving. And again, some. A lot of people say, well, we don't have a business model. I say, exactly, you don't. And that's why you're having sporadic results at best. So I just. I'm so concerned because I see people that at the end of their career, they. They think, well, I should have done this, I should have done that. And they realize it's too late. It's too late. So have the impact now. Do the tough stuff now and make a great life later. Yeah.

When you look at agencies and obviously you've been doing this for a little while, you know, whether, again, the recent things that we're doing, but going back to all years of consulting and different programs you've run, what are some examples that you see? Whether you're initially talking to an agency or maybe a producer, and you see these Examples of maybe they don't even know. Right. But. But they truly are winging it.

Yeah. Well, just when they know. You made me think of the time that this was. First time we started using this. It wasn't original. We had a gentleman in the program, and he was probably in his mid-60s, very successful agency owner, nice book of business, et cetera. And we got talking about the importance of process, the importance of playbooks, the importance of saying your agency's way of doing business. And you know when someone has a click is when their heads kind of slashes back and their eyes get real big. And I looked at him, I said, what happened? He said, man. He said, I just realized I've been winging it all these years. I've done okay, but I've. I. He said, I don't know why. Just we do stuff, and it works. And he said, if I would have just done half of what you said today, my agency would have been two or three times bigger. Now. He'd been in the game for quite a while. So when you look at this and you start thinking about what does winging look like? Well, Brent, you know that I'm a fan of Jeff Foxworthy. You know, it might be a redneck if. And I've. I've actually done surgeries before about, you know, you might be an average producer if. So here's some things about winging it that I thought of in our prep for today. You know, you. You might be a winger. If you don't have a business plan, you don't really have a. Well, you don't have an intentional one, let's put it that way. There's no written business plan that everybody can rally around. You might be winging it if. There's no relentless preparation if people don't rehearse before they go out to present, which drives me nuts. You know, everybody that's played a sport at any level, anybody that's been in theater, anybody that's been at music, they practice, practice, practice. Okay. I was. I was talking with Stephanie last night. We were watching America's Got Talent. We watch, you know, replay, and it was amazing. They had this. This father daughter group that they went up these really tall swinging poles. You know, they climbed up, they got on top, and they had handholds, and they're swinging back and forth and everything. It looks really dangerous. But just before they were starting, Simon Call said, what, you guys don't have any safety nets? And the dad said, we don't have safety nets. We practice a lot. I Thought, oh, I had to write that one down right away. So the people that don't do relentless preparation. Could you imagine showing up at an event that you haven't prepared for and yet wingers do it and they get away with it. They get away with it. No practice at all like we've talked about, you know, that's part of the preparation. There's, they, they don't get in front of their peers and rehearse. They don't record themselves on Zoom. It's amazing to me how many times when we get in a Zoom event and you get the people that are really committed to learning how to use the technology, what to do and how to look in the camera, etc. And others just, they show up and they, you know, the classic one is the person sitting in front of a window. They look like they're in the witness protection program. So they haven't even prepared, they don't even care what it looks like there. They, they say they're trying to have a division between sales and service. And as we say it's a division, but it's really a marriage of sales and service. And then we say, well, so you meet with your, your, your, the sales and service, they meet together on their teams every week. Right now they're, they're too busy, so they're, they're too busy to meet to be prepared to play the game. The producers that, and leaders that don't do, as we call it, the Sunday evening review, we don't care when you do it, but a formal debrief of last week and pre brief of this week so that when you get to the office Monday morning or you're checking in Monday morning, you have a plan of exactly where you're going, what you're doing, what things are important. You have a communication between sales and service. And our whole theme within best version possible. Same goal, different roles, right? There's an acknowledgement and appreciation of the different roles we play. But we're all playing together. Let's talk about it. You know, where are we in some of the renewals? What are the issues going on? Are there ready red flags? And so all of these things that they don't do, do, they're just showing up and waiting for something to happen. And it's, you know, they're aggressively waiting for one of my favorite terms, you know, the clicks, pings, rings and dings so they can do some stuff rather than saying what's the highest and best use of my time? What's the highest and best use of my teams. What am I going to do to retain and obtain ideal clients? Because you don't want to replicate every client you have, but people that just wing it, go, yeah, we're pretty busy. Pretty busy. So they're. The footprint of their agency continues to grow wider. You know, we say, okay, we got the bottom 80%, the middle 15%, top 5%. Well, if you don't change that model, it just keeps getting wider and wider and wider. And what happens is you run out of time to provide a great experience to then keep the accounts at a higher level and earn referrals from them. Do all those things you might be winging, but you can wing it and get away with it until the regrets show up.

Need to put that all together so you can have a whole skit right now like the Jeff Fox, you might be a winger if one thing I want to add to that and I share this on so many of our programs and this hit me. I learned this from a mentor years ago and I don't know, sure it's been said by multiple people, but it's very impactful. I said, you know, you really have two choices. You're either going to prepare or you're going to repair.

No. Yeah.

Which one? I mean, repeat that one.

Brent.

You really have two choices as an agency leader or insurance professional. You either prepare or you repair. And which one do you want to invest the time doing? And it goes back to other clicks we've shared. Is there some hard work in preparing? Yes. But what's even harder work? Repairing all the messes you made, trying to clean everything up, trying to fix the relationships you didn't establish up front, trying to go back to clients that you didn't do the right stuff with the first time, trying to re. Establish credibility after you look really stupid in a presentation that's really hard to repair. Right. So it's just, just hopefully that's sticky with all of you, that mindset of that and it really leads in and you address this a little bit, Roger. And we've talked about, you know, semi successful several times, so I'm sure it's part of this. And may, if it's okay with you, I sort of want to answer this question first and then get your thoughts on. That's a weird way to do an interview. But my question is why do so many agencies wing it? Because they do. We see it and it may part of it is they don't again even know. But here's what hit me, goes back to my sports analogy. Right. I said the 11, 11 guys on a football team, they show up on the field and they're like, what do you want to do? I don't know. Well, here's what happens. The bar is pretty low. And quite honestly, some of the lower level competition isn't very good. You could have 11 people line up in the field and you're gonna have a couple kids that are bigger and stronger, or you're gonna happen to navigate your way down the field only because you got a bit lucky and you go, oh, look, we, look, we scored. We still scored, right, because you got one really good athlete, AKA a great producer. Right. Or something like that, and you go, look, we're fine. But the truth of it is when you raise your game and you get to higher level competition, you go from peewee to, you know, to high school to college, to the. It doesn't work anymore. At some point, winging it runs out, you run out of luck, right? And then you get stuck and then back to what Roger says, you have the regrets. So can I kind of answer my own question? But I want to get your thoughts too, obviously. Why do so many agencies wing it?

Well, because they can't. That's what you're really saying. Because they can't.

Yeah.

You know, and they just, they don't. And I'm preaching to the choir. People are listening to this. They're committed to be. At least I hope they're committed to getting towards their best version possible.

Great.

And hopefully we're giving them our passion and our experience and wisdom on this stuff. But if they'll really sit back and analyze what's. What's getting them results and what is not getting results. Because the reality is, and this is one of the world famous 8020, 20% of what they do in all areas gets them 80% of their results in all areas. Okay? And what will happen all too often is they break two of the, what we coined the Sitkins rules, if you will, or whatever strategies, whatever we want to call them. But at the end of the day, if we don't know our 80, 20 in all areas, we very quickly have profitable accounts subsidizing, unprofitable. Overall, we're doing fine. Profit levels are pretty high right now in agencies. Okay. A lot of that's rate, hard market, etc. But so we have profitable accounts subsidizing, unprofitable, and we have profitable producers subsidizing, unprofitable producers. Now, overall we're pretty good. But one of the things that we Talk about this is a great example of winging it. What percent of producers meet or exceed their goals every year? And this is one that just drives me absolutely nuts. I think we mentioned it on one of our previous ones about four years ago, three and a half, four years ago, and I was working with a group of 19 agencies and the average agency in the room was 21 million of commission income. And I had done a big survey ahead of time of what they were looking for, what their needs were. We're accumulating the results to share amongst the group. And what got me again, 19 agencies, 21 million in revenue each. In that group, only 43% of the producers hit their goals. So even in a group like that, there's some winging that goes on. When I've talked to some of the other consultants in the business that I trust that really do a lot of the financial things. And we look at this and our best guess, because it's hard to get a number, but if you take it overall, it's about a third of the producers hit their numbers. Now, that either means the goal setting like everybody's going to do 200,000, or it's just not monitored at all. There's nothing at it because again, they don't have to. It's extra work. And when you start looking at some of that extra work, the leadership work, the big problem is nobody owns it because they're winging it. And so if you say to this, if you say to the, you know, say we have a group of three owners and a nice sized agency, who's doing, who's the, who's the chief revenue officer? Who does the monitoring and accountability with your producers? Who does the mentoring and coaching? Well, we know we, we meet like, you know, we try to have some sales meetings and, you know, but we, you know, we're doing okay. We're doing okay. Well, what about this? What about. Well, I, I know, I know. And what happens, you have a couple of big dog producers, many times owners that are carrying everything and they don't even look back and say, wait a minute, am I making a profit on each producer? Good example of winging it. Are you doing a P and L on every producer you have? Are you looking at the income, the direct expenses you have of paying them and the indirect expenses of servicing their book of business? And if you don't know that, if you don't know whether they're profitable, you're winging it. Now, new producers unvalidated yet. We get that. But what gets Me crazy is the ones that are quote validated but are retired in place. And you talk about winging it, that could be the winging it poster. Because they get in the service trap or they go on fake appointments. I'm really busy, I'm going. Then they're not, you know, and if that hits home, then maybe it's time to start looking at what some of your producers are doing. But you can get away with it because it's a great business. You can get away with it because 5% of your customers are 50% of your revenue. The top 2% of your customers are at least a 30 year revenue. Not every agency, just almost everyone. Yeah. So these are just some things that they can absolutely get away with it. And they go, yeah, we know we should have that. But things are okay. Things are okay. Yeah, they are for now. They won't be long term.

Yeah, yeah. What does, you know, we talk about having a playbook and we're going to talk more and more and we have already about, you know, the power of proven process. But what is a playbook? What is having some of these, these processes in place? What does it really provide? Agencies, Roger.

Guardrails provides guardrails. It provides. This is the way we do business. It provides the ability to develop their people. It's a way to onboard new people. So I'm bringing in a new service person. Here's exactly how we do business. Here's exactly how we do business. Okay. If we don't have that, it's the old days and I'm sure a lot of people listening probably went through this like I did in my parents agency. There's your desk, right. There's some angles in the old days, you know, and that phone's going to ring, don't you worry. So having something that you can say, this is our business model which we talk about all the time. I've already talked about it today. Current business models, perfectly designed, et cetera. So when we have the playbook, we say here's exactly how we do business. This is our agency's way of doing business. These are our proven processes. That's such an important word. You've used it several times. One of my recent Rough notes articles was about it. When you have processes that are proven otherwise, proven process, but they're proven that they work, then it's which we talked about in the last, the last click. Then there's that PhD, that pigheaded discipline to say this is how we do business. There shouldn't be a question about it. Now, is there some flexibility? Sure. Okay. Because we're not automating everything. Things that are automated should just go, there's flexibility. But the term we use all the time, flexibility without delusion. And what happens in an average agency is everybody starts putting their own flexibility on it till it's diluted down to some hysterical activity. But we call it our process. Yeah. So if you're, if your process is hysterical activity, you're way underperforming as an agency. So, I mean, I think you can tell I could have a couple sermons on this.

Well, it's. And I love it because it's true. And again, you know, the agency leaders that are listening, I mean, there's so many takeaways you could have from it. I mean, my, I think very much analogies and pictures and I may go back to that football team one more time here later. But know, I just keep thinking about, you know, having structure. And when I wrote down, and you've heard me talk about this, this has been a bit of a blinding flash of the obvious. The more I go deeper into it is that true structure gives you true freedom.

And it's just, you know what, Take, take that deeper. I'm interview you now. Take that deeper and, and tell them about the holes in the calendar. Well, when you talked about this last week and this week with the producers.

Yeah.

They went nuts.

Well, good way. Yeah. Because I mean, think about this. And we'll just use the calendar and I don't have the exact quote in front of me, but I can paraphrase it pretty well from a. Here, from a book that I was reading. At your best. But it's, it's just interesting. You think of, think about how a lot of people think, right? You look at your calendar, go, okay, I've got a, I got a 9am meeting and I got a 1pm meeting on Monday. And then Tuesday I got these two appointments in the morning. Wednesday, I only have one in the afternoon. I mean, you kind of go through. Okay, and then what's the rest on that calendar? It's blank. Right. And what the initial human response is, oh, great, I've got some freedom, right? I, I can, I can catch up on things. I can do things. I can whatever. And the way that the summary of this is that those holes in your calendar are truly, they look like freedom, but it's actually jail. Yeah, it's actually jail because you can never get out. Because what happens is, is what you get trapped into what you believe is free and ultimately turns into either lack of productivity, complexity, confusion, right? You name it, because you just. And maybe you feel busy to be talked about, but you don't get much done. And here's my analogy to this. Whether this is your individual calendar or your entire agency, do you want to be a Walmart parking lot or the autobahn, right? I mean, the Walmart parking lot is. You've got all these nooks and crannies and people are pulling out, and you got to stop and move around, maneuver here. There's all this stuff, these moving parts. The autobahn's pretty simple. Got a bunch of lanes. There's a little bit of. I mean, there's, there's structure, right? Because you can't go anywhere, but as long as you stay in this certain area, you can go as fast as you want, right? And so there's just a difference of this structure. I love when you say it, Roger. Guardrails. And most people's entrepreneurial spirit says, I don't want any guardrails. You don't tell me what to do, but without it. And by the way, I'm probably speaking to myself, right? In some areas, I don't tell them I could figure this out. But all of a sudden you realize, wait a second. If I get the right guardrails, this kind of leads to my next question to you, Roger. If I get the right guardrails in place, I still have some level of flexibility because I want to use my human element, and there's going to be that flexibility around it. But gosh darn, I finally will be able to go a lot faster, right? So I don't know if that answered your question you're asking me, but that's stuff that I. I see. Did you want to elaborate on that before I ask you the next question?

Just I. I can't help but laugh. And what do I, you know, you can't tell me what to do. And I love it. I. When I used to do a lot of speaking at one year, I did 42 state association speeches in one year between companies and associations. And it seems like I'd always have this one guy, wasn't the same guy, but it was the same guy that would always come up afterwards, always had our rumpled clothes on and stuff. He'd go, well, you know, I heard what you're talking about. But I. I've been doing pretty good. I've been in the business 25 years now, and things are going pretty good. I say, how big your book of business? 200,000. After 25 years, you know, Deep down inside, I'm saying, I'm sorry, Sparky, I'm not that impressed. But it's just they, they, they fall into the trap, the semi successful trap, because they're making more money than they thought they'd make. And it just, it drives me crazy because I look at this and I say, look again. Flexibility is fine to a degree, but when we have the guardrails in place, when we have the proven processes that work, not we think they're going to work, but when we put them in place, we say, this is our business model. This is the way we do business. Here's what happens. It's pretty simple, predictable and guaranteed results. Because the processes with the right attitude. And we talk about skills, processes and attitudes. Yeah, when they're in place and you do this, this, this and this, it works sort of like if you had a recipe for your favorite meal and you do exactly what it says, it's going to turn out that way. Well, maybe I'll throw this and maybe I'll throw that and maybe it won't cook it along, whatever it may be. And so the thing I love about it is when you, you have the proven processes in place, first of all, there's clarity amongst the team. Oh, that's how we do business. Now when we bring new people in, here's exactly how we do business again. People development. And then finally we're going to look at the results we're getting. Look at the results we're getting. And you know, go back to the, you know, 40 or 33 to 41% of the producers hitting their goals. What if 80% of the producers hit their goals? Our industry would do so great if just 80% hit their goals. Right. And by the way, you don't hit them by lowering them. Oh, I hit my goals. I said my goal is only 25,000 instead of 100. No, but it's so exciting when we see people realize, and we've talked about this before and I, I love the quote from, from Vince Lombardi. You know, perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we might catch excellence. All right, so we look at this and say, okay, 100% of the people hitting their goals, that's perfection. What if 80% hit? What if 80% hit? What IF we had the proven process of the people follow, at least 80% of the time, it's five times better than what's going on now. So that's one of the joys of what we do, the passion we have around helping people become their Best version possible is when we see the results and we see how happy they are and they're going, God, it's easier. It was tough to make the change, but it's really easier now because everybody knows what's going on. Yeah, that's the goal.

Well, and I want to share too, Roger. I mean, you know, at Sidkins Group with us internally, we've talked a lot about the power of process and none of us are perfect. I mean, something we know we've got to get better at too. What, what hit me with this, this is true with agencies, certainly really any organization. But what I was thinking about is a lack of processes or the right processes, which again, when people hear that word. Oh, right. But the lack of the right processes prevent top performers from spending enough time in their true greatness. Right. That's what ultimately happens. And I know obviously a Dan Sullivan, your unique ability, but if you don't have the right guardrails, you've got to make all these extra decisions that could have already been done ahead by having a process. And it prevents you from being at your highest level of human emotion and capacity and the greatness and the conversations you want to have, whatever it is, right from your skills. So it's just thinking about that is, that's why, that's why I said earlier that structure equals true freedom. Right. You finally get that aligned. So it's just, it's such an important point. Is there a specific. And maybe again you've mentioned different areas of this, but are there any. We call non optionals, guardrails, maybe a better way of saying it that you see that have been most impactful in winning agencies.

Well, the first one is the guardrail around green zones, which we've talked about now and we've said many times of everything I've ever developed and everything we've developed together now, it's the stickiest. The green zone. Green zone, Green zone. And so when we have the whole process around the high performance team, the whole process around the service handoff, defining what day to day services and make sure the client gets educated to know who they deal with on day to day service. When we see that the whole process around green zone, even if they don't do much else differently, it just gets them in the game. And you've used the analogy of, you know, in the NBA Finals, you want your best players on the, on the court. Right. And so the green zone, when they can, when they say this is the overall process. Now green zone itself, there's several processes behind it but you know we always start with the end in mind. What's the end in mind? We want our producers in the green zone 80% of the time doing the green zone activities which are sales, relationship management, continuations and pipeline building. That's it. That's a producer's job. Four things. So that's, that's the one. If I had to pick just one. Well maybe that's one A the first one of course is agency alignment which we talk about all the time. We've got to get everybody aligned but then right away to say okay if we had to do one thing, what is it? Well the, the focus point there is time spent selling tss. So what has to happen for our producers to be in the green zone? 80% of time. Once we get that now everything else starts happening. But if they don't do that first then they're not going to buy the time to do the right things and we see them get really frustrated. It's also Brennan points out the need that you can't chase everything and too many people. I'm one year one quick starts. We love those bright and shiny things and we chase too many things and I know we've talked about this several times but getting down to the point of okay, what's, what are the vital few things you have to do that are just going to be non optionals that these are guardrails no matter what and then let's, let's really focus on one of them at a time. So if we took a 90 day internal sprint to master the green zone once we have alignment but then to master the green zone results are phenomenal. And it's quick. It's only 90 days. That sounds like a lot. How many 90 day segments have you wasted over the last 10 years?

That's right. Well and I indicated at the beginning of this that we're going to be talking about the best version possible as an experience and it really is, it is a proven process and we've spent a lot of time and hours in discussion obviously packaging your 40 plus years in the industry. I mean I guess I've been around, I'm looking at my beard here, pretty gray. I've been around for 20 plus years in the insurance industry and of course all the experience with clients and again the results and you just start one thing that you know, I've talked about this before that I, I really work hard at, we work hard as a group is trying to simplify and hey, what is it really about? Because you know I've said this before agency leaders, and I know I'm talking to you, you don't need more things to do. You just need to get focused on the right things to do. But one of the questions, what is it? Well, how do I know what it is and you know, Roger talked about is what if, what if we got truly understood the power of alignment, that we're speaking a common language and message throughout our agency. What would that mean if we started to get some of those culture things right? And as Roger indicated, what if we got really focused on one metric, time spent selling? We actually got our producers in the game. What would that, what would that mean if we got that simplified? It's just that, what if we understood, and Roger already alluded to this, the power of 80 20, knowing that 20% of our clients give us 80% of our results. And we began to develop plans to leverage that in the right way to earn and generate referrals, to build a huge pipeline around it. But if we just got focused just on that, and then what if we just got focused on how we're different and of course, our last click was around that. But positioning in the marketplace to have a true unique selling proposition that our entire agency and of course the producers could speak like we did, just those four things. Say, just. Yeah, it's work, but wow. Like, wow. So now that I just did that, I'm going to try, try to wind back into the. Actually, you can, you can, you can define this for me because I just went through, you know, we're talking about power proven process in a playbook. So you tell me, Roger, if an agency were able to have a playbook, a process, a guided roadmap, whatever term you want to use, what's the outcome? What does it look like?

Well, I'm going to come back predictable and guaranteed results. You have everybody aligned. You have the producers in the green zone. 80% of the time, the common goal is retaining and obtaining ideal clients. And then we have a selling system that's based upon points of differentiation. We differentiate in the marketplace. We become the competition that's feared. And so it's those four things. It's alignment, it's green zone, it's retained and replicate, and then it's obtained. And that's, that's the process we've learned. That's what the whole BVP best version process is going to be about. Best version possible experience is about. As we're, we're coming out with this. Yeah, we're teasing a little bit, but the reality Is we've put a lot of effort into this. This is what works. And no, nobody's, you know the thing. Do agencies do everything? We haven't had a single agency ever do 100 of what works. We talk about why. Number one, there's too much. Number two, you won't agree with it all. You're going to fine tune a little bit. But. But if we could say they're just four things to agree upon, it's agency alignment. I love in Jim Collins book, he says a visionary company is 1% vision and 99 alignment. Absolutely true. Okay. We get everybody aligned when we get Green Zone maxed out, at least. What if we just got them to 50 or 60 green zone versus 10 or 12 that they're at now? Then our whole focus is retaining and replicating. Replicate who the clients we want to replicate because you don't want to replicate them all and then finally have this differential selling system. It works. It works.

I, I don't, I don't think we've shared it on here. And this is something fairly new. And, and again, we'll talk more about this when this all gets rolled out, because I think you talked about the Vince Lombardi quote, right. You know, in that pursuit, and you can say it right, at perfection, we can catch excellence. I know, I kind of screwed that up a little. The idea is like, what's hit me is that if we could get 100% focus, which by the way is really hard to get because there's the dings, the rings, the pings, the noise, the distraction, the, the new, the new idea, the gimmick of the month, we go down the line, right? If we get a hundred percent focus in our communication, our message and what we're trying to develop, we're not going to get 100% outcome, just not right. That's not realistic. But what if he got 80%? Do you want to expand upon that a little bit?

Sure, sure. What I've seen all too often, especially as we're finalizing the BVP experience, is that people set themselves up for failure, okay. And what they do is they think that they're going to do 100% and then they realize they won't. So then there's some fear, like, will I look bad as a leader? People won't go along, there's going to be more conflict. And so this really hit me like, like a ton of bricks. Yes, we want 100 effort, we want 100% focus as much as we can get it. But there's also called Life and stuff, that's out of your control. But I think about this. If. If we could execute the behaviors and strategies that we've identified as our agency's way of doing business at the 80% level, that's really high compared to the average agency. If we can get the producers in the green zone 80% of the time, that's really high. We won't get them there 100%. Plus, our plan doesn't even call for them to be there. 100%. Right. If 80% of the customers we wanted to replicate gave us a referral because we earned one, and then on those referrals, we closed 80% of them and 80% of our producers met or exceeded their sales goals. That sounds like a great agency to me. That's the goal. That's the goal. I guess we're giving it away a little early here, but that's.

Well, it's just. It's. I mean, it's important because then again, I mean, we're joking, we're teasing it, but I mean, something. We've put a tremendous amount of thought and energy and again, there's a years and years of experience, condensed and stuff. And certainly that's why I have Roger on this podcast. I mean, I legitimately. And this isn't to devalue what I bring or any of our team members. But listen, I'd be silly to say, hey, Roger, what really works, why does it work, and how do we do it in today's marketplace? And you start to put it together and go, listen, you know, no one's going to be perfect, but if we can finally get agencies to realize that it's not about saying yes to more things, it's actually be more diligent to say no. The things that don't really work, so they can get focused on the right things, give them a proven process, a roadmap, a structure to walk them through, to help develop their entire team in a systematic approach and be a resource around that journey. Wow. And part of this is what we see with agencies that are doing this stuff, because it does come back to, yes, selfishly, we want to do really well as a company. But bigger than that, and we've talked a lot about this, is the mission and the purpose of why we do what we do, that we get to have these stories with agency leaders and professionals that say, hey, listen, you really helped transformed me, my life, my career, my family in a way that I never thought possible. That's why we really do it. Right. And if we do a good job of that agencies get this freedom financially, time relate, you know, relationships, they get deeper in their purpose and the result of that is everyone wins. So that truly and Roger, you know, that's from my heart. There's no script on this. And again, you're going to hear more about it. We're going to have, we have one more click. So one more click together, we're going to get through and it's going to be all about agency leadership. And I can't wait to talk about that and what that click really means. A different thought process, mindset and action of what the best agency leaders do. And by the way, I know you as a listener, you wouldn't be listening if you weren't trying to get better. And so I applaud you for that. I know sometimes you preach the choir, but I'm guessing there's a nugget or two from today that you can take and say, listen, there's another level for me. So before I close, Roger, any final comments from you on this session?

Yes, the best version possible. Sitting out there waiting for you as a leader or you as an individual to show up.

Yeah, there you go. Hey listen, if again this podcast has been helpful to you, always looking for a rating and review. We're looking to grow the audience, appreciate you being a listener and with that, I wish you all the best in your success. Thanks. The Agent Leader podcast is brought to you by the fine folks, the Rough Notes Company. They are 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.

Sam.