Consistency Builds Results

Have you ever got really excited about something? I mean, really excited? You watch something, you read something, you listen to something, you talk to someone, and there was an idea that really fired you up that you want to go out and tackle only to find yourself three weeks, three months, three years later, not doing any of it. Yeah, me too. And we're going to talk about that today, today on the Agent Leader Podcast. My name is Brent Kelly. I'm the host of the Agent Leader Podcast. I want to thank you and welcome you into today's episode. And the purpose of this podcast, as always, is to help you, the agency leader, regardless of your role, your title, your position, to help you gain clarity, build consistency, and to make a commitment to become your best version possible. And in fact, as I teed up the conversation for today's content, I was looking through our book, which is kind of funny when you write a book, and this was co authored with Roger Sitkins called, called Best Version Possible. By the way, go to sitkins.com bvp to get your copy, whether it's an audible version, if you want to listen to it, the paperback version or the downloadable version, whatever it is you want, the best version possible is the Roadmap for Agencies. In fact, the subtitle on here, which we're going to get in today, says, the blueprint for achieving even greater profit and impact in your agency with less effort. Now, the word that I want to focus on is impact, right? What is the impact that you are trying to make specifically as an agency leader, again, regardless of your specific position, that truly moves the needle. And what's interesting, you think about impact, right? The word that I think about, I mentioned intensity versus consistency. Impact. It's about intensity, right? That's going to give us impact. And I love intensity. I'm a pretty intense guy. Maybe you've already noticed. And I know many agency leaders that we work with are pretty intense people for the most part, right? They get fired up about stuff. That's why it's fun to work with agency leaders. But one of the things that I've noticed in working with agency leaders and just knowing my own personality is that intensity is really the easy part. It's consistency that's the hard part. And when you think about impact, true impact is not made through intensity. It's made through consistency. And that's why I believe that consistency will always beat intensity. I don't think it's an either or. I think it can be a both and. But I do think there needs to be more of a Focus on consistency. Now, the last couple weeks or week or so, I had the pleasure of speaking in a couple different events and I do this quite often. It was interesting though, because one of the events was a more private leadership. It was about 30 agency leaders and we went really deep over two and a half days and several different subjects and thoughts, important principles. And then the second event I was at was a huge event, tons of agencies in the great state of Florida. And I delivered a keynote address. And what's interesting to me is that, you know, one was two and a half days, one for me was 45 minutes. I know the event in Florida was over a few days, but this idea that you go to an event and you think about all the people that you hear from, all the people you talk to, all the conversations you have, all the new input, right? Which is kind of why we go there, right? We want to reestablish connections, we want to learn new things that we can take back to our agency. It's exciting, but it's a bit overwhelming, right? And that's the intensity part. You know, for two days or whatever it is, I'm going to pour into this stuff, I'm going to be really intense and then we come back to our agency and maybe we're intense or excited for a day or two or a week or whatever it is, but it's short lived, right? Because we haven't thought about the consistency. So here's my initial thought that I want to share with you now. I'm going to give you three practical ways to or things that you can think about to help your agency have more consistency. Because that's one of the biggest frustrations we see in working with agencies like you is the fact that we start things, we just don't finish them real well, right? And that is the hardest part of obviously of being consistent is to stay through it. When there's doubt, there's frustration, there's boredom. Well, here's the first thing I want to share. We get into this is the fact that you may have heard the phrase, and I've talked about this before, the fact that if something's really important to do two months from now, right, like you, you thought through this and you go, you know, this would really be a game changer for me personally or certainly for our agency professionally. We really not should do this, we must do this. And I believe that it's important. If it's important enough like that important to do two months from now, why not start some of that today? Whether it's discussions or some form of the process, like, why would you wait? Right. Why would you give up two months or whatever time period that is. I agree with that. But I have learned, and talking with agencies that are implementing change in their agency is that I think even a more important question to ask is, whatever change it is that you're wanting to do, whatever transformation that you seek, do you truly visualize? Do you see? Do you picture? Is it part of the DNA? Is it part of the culture one year from now? Because if you don't really see it, right, and you can picture, okay, we're going to start this thing and one year from now, we're going to be doing this at a much higher level and it'll be part of our identity, right, as an agency. Right. Some significant change. If you don't really see that, then don't do it because again, most of us can see a day or two or a week, oh, this is exciting. But what does it look like one year from today? And I will tell you as a quick start, nature, this is something I have to be really cautious of because I love new ideas, I love reading books, I love listening to podcasts, I love talking and learning from people. But just like the event I was at, right? And I tell people this events themselves do not create change. And I speak at events, right? So why would I be there? Because events don't cause change. Events are catalysts for change. Events. To me, the right way is there's something, and maybe it's a couple things, but there's something that really jumped out, that of all the things you took in all the conversations you had, this thing makes the most sense. And I'm going to take this back and I'm going to put some thought into it, right? Why are we doing it? Because that, to me, is the. The biggest number one thing. If you're going to be consistent, you need to know at a very deep level why you're doing it in the first place. And maybe there's a quick reaction, oh, this is why I'm doing it. Go deeper. In fact, there's a great exercise that I've used and worked. I learned from Dean Graziosi, and I've used it with some of the agency leaders. And it's a really challenging exercise. It's called seven levels deep. Right. So how this works is we're going to start doing this. Great. Why is that important? Well, it's important because of this. Awesome. Why is that important? And you keep going seven levels deep, and you may Think, well, that sounds kind of silly. I will tell you what happens when you go deep and ask yourself those meaningful questions is that oftentimes the answer that you first give is a mouth or head answer. It's a quick response answer. And as you continue to go deeper, you get to the heart or the soul of it. That's where culture changes that. This isn't something we're doing for two weeks. That just seems cool and fun and we'll see where it go. We'll just see where it goes. It's. This is something that's so important and so deep as I've gone in my, my why that it must be part of our culture and DNA, right? That to me is the difference of just a quick idea versus going deep and having meaningful, powerful change. So, number one, if you're going to build consistency in your agency of anything, is before you start the process, you've got to identify the why at a deep level. Most agencies, if they start a change, they start with a process. This is our new system, this is our new way of doing this. This is X, this is Y. It seems to make logical sense. The problem is is that a, you may not get full buy in yourself, but more importantly is your team may not buy in. In fact, they probably won't because you're probably going to have another idea the next week and another idea after that. So part of the culture is, why is this so important? Now you're never going to get 100% buy in, right? Because they're human beings, not robots. But to really articulate what is the impact this will have, why is it meaningful, why is it important? How will affect you, how will affect our clients, to get them to understand the emotional context behind it, then we can get into the process. And then as we get into the process, more people say, oh, that makes sense of why we're doing it. I may not want to do it, I may not like it, but I get how it aligns with the culture, the why that we've been talking about. Which leads me to number two. And by the way, these all overlap to a degree, but again, it's something. Why, why does consistency not take shape? Why do we start things and stop them? Right? And this is again, from an agency perspective, number one, we don't go deep enough. We don't get the why really articulate it. Number two is we don't communicate it enough to our team members or even to ourselves. Right? If you're going to make a personal change, one of the things you may have seen or heard before is you put sticky notes in your room or put stuff on your mirror, put reminders, make it visual. I love that. And as a leader of a team, you've got to communicate that consistently, whatever that is, right? Communicate consistently. I had a mentor of mine years ago, and I'll never forget this. He's talking about communication and leadership. And he said, you know, for most leaders, they stop talking about it too soon. They say it once or twice or maybe three times, or maybe at a big meeting, this is what we're going to do. And they never really talk about it again. And one of the reasons they do that is they feel like they've already said it, right? It's in their head. And they go, I don't need to say it again. I've already said it. And here's what this mentor said to me. The minute you, as an agency leader think that you have said something too much that's important, you're finally getting close. You're finally getting close, right? And one of the things, again, we do in our network of agencies and help agency leaders do this is we want to help spread the message, right? When we identify what's really important, they're going to hear it from them, and we're going to, hey, listen, you got to say it again, you got to say it again, you got to say it again, you got to say it again. Right? So help the leaders continue to communicate that, but also support and empower them by us sharing a similar message. So part of that is communicate often, right? And communicate and have other people help you communicate or share that message, whether it's internally or externally, make things visual, make it a big deal, right? Because by the way, and this something I've shared before in the podcast, this happens for a lot of agency leaders. And I know as a team and as a leader, I struggle with this. I'm not careful. Is that if every week or every month you come in with a new idea, a new flavor of the month, a new gimmick of the month, a new thing we're going to do, right? Your team eventually may nod to you because they're being polite, but the minute you leave the room, they look at each other or a few people look at each other and say, don't worry, this too shall pass. They will move on, they'll forget, so don't worry about doing it. And the leader goes, why is anybody doing it? I just mentioned it's a big deal. Okay, well, let's do this now, right? So we understand how this happens in agencies. So number one, go deep. Go really understand your why. Number two, communicate it more often than you think you need to communicate it. And number three, here's the big one. This is the commitment part. If something's really important enough to do, not just now, but long term, you must seek and find accountability behind it. You must seek and find accountability. You may say, brent, I am the most disciplined person in the world. My team is so disciplined. Guess what? Your team also is. And guess what? You also are human. Which means you ain't perfect, right? Just acknowledge that up front. Say, listen, the best people in the world. And of course I've done a podcast on this. They have a coach or accountability partner, someone there that they can say, listen, this is really important to me and I know there's going to be times when maybe I get frustrated or I fall off or I lose track, I get distracted, I don't know, whatever it is, bored, frustrated. I need you to help me be accountable to getting back of doing it. Because I've gone deep, I know it's important. I want to continue to communicate this. And so I have to make sure, first and foremost as a leader, I don't fall off. Secondly, as a team, as we implement this, we all need to be accountable to each other on this. The best teams, sports, business, music, I don't care. Like, we all have to be accountable together, right? Music, you can't have a saxophone player on a different sheet of music than the tromp than the trombone player, right? Doesn't work. So not only do we have to be align what we're doing, but committed and accountable to doing it. Otherwise it breaks down really quick, right? Sports teams, if we're running a play, we're going to use football, right? Like, we got to be on the same page and be accountable to doing the things we agree to doing. Otherwise again, it's chaos. So you've got to find and seek accountability in your efforts of doing that. So I wanted to show today there's three areas there. But it just hit me as I went and spoke at these events and, and I love it. I love getting excited. And I kept thinking to myself, man, like I've been here at two different events having conversations. Some of these people are in a lot more conversations than I'm in. Can you imagine about how many ideas and thoughts that they're writing down? It's cool. I am not anti ideas. I love ideas. It spurs creativity, it spurs engagement, it spurs all these things. But when it comes down to it, what are you actually going to apply? And you can't apply everything, right? It's been said before, there are always more ideas than there is capacity to execute. We know that. Oh, we'll get to them all. No you won't. Right. So identify with the one that you truly resonate with. What is this one idea that you want to go deep in your why? What's this one idea that you can see yourself communicating to your team and yourself again and again and again? What's this one idea that you can bring in people to help you be accountable? Coaches, mentors, advocates and say listen, we're going here, we're doing this, this is important. And I know myself enough to know that I may fall short, my team may fall short. I need you to help me be accountable to doing this right. So those three things are critical to build true consistency in your agency. We talk about best version possible process. We talk about clarity, consistency and commitment. And they all go hand in hand. Clarity on what you want consistency to do, the vital few and the commitment to have accountability behind it. They all fall together. Consistency beats intensity. Listen, I hope this podcast. I know this is a shorter version, but just something that inspired me. I want to inspire you to think about some of these things. If we can be of assistance for you, please go to sitkins.com we've got a number of program offerings in fact on a time timely basis here our next level of programs. We've got one for producers which we're most famous for. Our Producer Fit program, an account manager program and a sales leader program that run over the period of eight weeks. If you want to learn more about those programs, it's our best version possible quick start process. We can get your agency inundated in that we also have one started in October so get started on the process. Be able to take some of these things and say what does it mean for me and what am I really going to apply and take that and turn that into a long term consistent approach. I wish you, I wish your agency all the best in your success. Thanks for listening. The Agent Leader Podcast is brought to you by the fine folks of 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 bridge issues. Visit them and learn more at roughnotes. Com.