Culture of Excellence in Your Insurance Agency

Welcome to the Agent Leader podcast. My name is Brent Kelly, your host. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode. Have a lot of really important content to share today about your agency's culture. And something that I want to talk about today is what is a culture of excellence? What does a culture of excellence mean to you as an agent leader to your agency, your team, your clients, your community? You name it, right? It's all about a culture of excellence. And you know, part of this topic came up because of some conversations we've had the last couple weeks with our private client members. And one of my favorite things I get an opportunity to do is to be a coach with some of top agency leaders across the country as part of our private client network. And in fact, if you want to learn more about that and what that might mean for your agency, just go to sitkins.com experience sitkins.com experience to learn more about our network and the best version possible, experience. But in those coaching calls, you know, one of the things that come up over the past few weeks and through our programs that we run for all of our members as well, whether it's our producer development programs, our service development programs, our sales leadership development programs, really has, if I could take one theme, it's been around excellence. And what is a culture of excellence? What does that actually mean for your agency? One of the illustrations that we, we show with agencies is an iceberg. It's something that's relevant. It's very visible. The fact that you think about an iceberg, that 10% of an iceberg is visible, it's above the waterline that you can see. That's what most people would notice. It's, it's stuff that's, it's shallow, it's trivial, it's there. But the depth, the important stuff is below the waterline. That's where the excellence is comes in. In fact, excellence is part of an acronym that we share all the time. I've mentioned it on this podcast, Deep Going Deep. Delivering excellence in every process. So what I want to do today a little bit and talk to you, the agent leader, is this idea of what does excellence mean to you? And to go a little bit deeper in one specific area. It's about the ultimate competitive advantage that your agency has. And it's something that we see all the time with agencies that I think can get overlooked. And the reason it can get overlooked is that you don't have to do a lot of the stuff that I'm going to talk about today. And you can still Be okay. You can still be pretty good, quite honestly, but you'll never reach that level of that culture of excellence that, that best version possible that we teach and preach through processes and attitude and, and skill development. If this isn't part of the culture, and this is something that, in fact, we're going to be going through a program with our producers around this specific topic. But this is agency wide as well. So this topic today that I'm going to talk about can certainly apply to the agency holistically, and it should, but it certainly is something that you need to be discussing with your producers. Or if you're a producer listening to this, I would challenge you to say the same thing. What is your culture of excellence? And to me it starts and it centers around the ultimate competitive advantage that every agency, every producer has. The ultimate competitive advantage that you as an agency have, that your producer has, that you as an individual of an agency, an insurance professional has, doesn't depend on your level of experience. It doesn't depend on how many markets you have. It doesn't depend on every tool and resource that your agency has. Now, are those important? Yeah, of course they're important, but this doesn't matter about those things. This is about you and a culture of excellence. The ultimate competitive advantage is this. What is your level expectation and excellence around preparation, Preparation for every person in your agency? Now certainly we get into to producers, this is probably the most prevalent because they're on the front line, so to speak, right? Having these new conversations with future ideal clients, current conversations with clients, centers of influence, right? They're the sales engine of the agency. And I say this to producers. Same thing I just mentioned. For agencies that, you know, regardless of your experience, does that matter? Sure, it matters to a degree. And your markets and your tools, right? Maybe processes that we help teach. But you know, whatever those are, at the end of the day, this is what you have 100% control of. This is as an agency leader, what you have an agency leader have 100% control of indictment. Dictating the culture doesn't mean it's going to be perfect. We know that. But what if we can strive for a hundred percent? Like this is with a vision of excellence in the agency based around our level of preparation and practice. Some things that we talk about all the time. What if we got 80% of that? I can tell you that's way ahead of most agencies, right, because you're never going to get 100%. We know perfection is not attainable, but as Vince Labardi said, in the chase of perfection, we can catch excellence, right? And that's what this is, is really all about. So I want to talk about the ultimate competitive advantage. And a lot of this is around three areas. I mean, to me, a culture of excellence and the ultimate competitive advantage around preparation. I think there's, there's three main points. Number one, there's a mindset, right? The mindset of, this is who we are. This is how we do things, right? Every great organization, whether it's, you know, business, sports, right? You name it, the best performers, the best, you know, agencies, the best businesses, there is a set level of expectation. We're not going to settle to average. We are going to aspire to excellence. Maybe that's something you can think about, talking to your team about, hey, we're not going to settle for average. We're not going to settle for good enough. We're going to aspire for excellence. Because why not, right? I mean, why not? The late, great Jim Rohn always said, he said this. I love this quote. He goes, you know, how. How tall does an oak tree grow? How tall does an oak tree grow? Everybody kind of thinks about it like, well, it grows as tall as it possibly can. Yet as humans and as organizations, businesses, insurance agencies, we sometimes go, that's pretty good, right? Why? Like, we are designed to be our best version. Let's, let's, let's aspire for that. So let me talk about some of these things that jump in. And part of this, you know, there's a, there's a mindset around the ultimate competitive advantage that I think if this becomes part of the culture, the DNA of your agency, you are definitely on the road to aspire for excellence. Like, let's, let's, let's search for that. Let's reach for that. Let's grow to this. So one of the things that hits me just in the marketplace overall is the fact that you are either going to fear the competition that's out there. Oh, this agency's pretty good. They're pretty good. Or you will be the competition that's feared. Now, this is all going to come in preparation. I mentioned there's a mindset, then there's. There's the action, which is the second part of this. There's a mindset, then there's the action. And the third part I want to talk about is accountability around that, right? Those, those three all become a culture of excellence around this, this idea of being relentlessly prepared and that, you know, listen, we are going to be the agency that when Other producers and agencies compete against us in different ways. It doesn't mean we're always going to win. Right. That happens. You're not going to win everyone, but they're going to go, wow, we're going against that group, we're going against that agency. That's going to be rough, right? That's going to be rough. How are we going to do that? So again, think about that. So these are some mindset things. Here's some other things that I think should be part of a culture of excellence in terms of your preparation, that ultimate competitive advantage. This should be this. I, as an agency leader will inspire my team and hold them accountable. I'll talk more about that in a minute. The fact that we will never lose to someone more prepared than we are. We'll never lose to someone more prepared than we are. I mean, right now, would that be part of the culture of the agency? Well, it might depend, Brent. You know, some do, some don't. Well, are we allowing that? Right? One of the things that, again, I said this earlier again, this doesn't depend on experience in markets and all these things that, that's the one thing that you have a hundred percent control of, of. Listen, we're not, we're not going to win every single time, but we will always be the most prepared, all right? We will always put the time, energy and effort because we're focused on the right things to be the most prepared. We think about producers. How often do producers, and this can be true, right, in any, any many different departments, but certainly with insurance producers that they show up, they throw up and then they blow up, they show up. I should, I went to, I showed up, I'm here and then I just throw up, I just say things and then I come back and get mad because we didn't write the account. And typically it's more excuse based than debriefing where I made mistakes, where I could have done better, right? And, and this happens, we had a, one of our producers in our, in our camp a few years ago. So it was funny and I appreciate his transparency. He said, we said, what did you learn from today's session? It was all about preparation and excellence. And he said, well, I, I learned today that I'm going to stop rehearsing my presentation during the presentation. I'm going to stop rehearsing my presentation during the presentation because let's face it, once you're there, it's too late, right? It's too late now. Can you get away with it in this business? And You've been doing it for a while. Yeah, you probably can guess what, the bar is really low if that's where you and your agency want to compete. And I'm challenging you right here because, listen, I talk to agencies. I just. One thing that I believe in as a coach and as a leader, you know, the Sitkins Group and the Sitkins Network and working with agencies, is that, listen, I want to inspire you and help you to aspire to excellence so that you look back in your life as an agency or as a producer and say, listen, I don't have any regrets. I didn't win everything. I made mistakes, Things happen. I don't have regrets, at least not in this area, because I showed up prepared. I delivered excellence in every process that I had. Right. And one of the things that you can just think about this is that every event, and these are all mindset ideas, every event deserves my very best. Is that part of the culture of your agency? Culture of excellence? I mean, would, would your team right now say, hey, you know what? Every event, if we're going to show up, if we're going to go to a networking event, if we're going to have a meeting with our center of influence, certainly we're going to talk to one of our A and B future ideal clients, a target account that we really want in our agency, our current client as great importance. Are we showing up that every opportunity deserves our very best, or are we going to say, that was pretty good and we'll keep doing some more of that? Right? Which, which, which one is it going to be? Right? Every opportunity deserves your very best. So that's, that's the mindset part of a culture of excellence. And part of this is as a leader, challenge your team. But you got to set the tone, challenge your team. What you can't do as a leader is ask your team for excellence and you deliver average. Now, obviously, as a leader, you may have different roles and responsibilities than people on your team. Certainly. Now I know a lot of agency leaders are also in production, so this will apply in both, both areas. But bottom line is that if you're a modeling average and you expect excellence, well, what do you think's going to happen? Right? Culture of excellence, what does that mean? I think that's a, again, a great question to ask from a mindset perspective is what does that really mean for agents? If we decide to be a culture of excellence, and I hope you do, what does that really mean for our agency? And I gave you some mindset ideas. This is who we are. This is how we live. This is how we breathe. This is our DNA. I always think about that with sports teams, and I'm a sports fan. I know I use a lot of sports analogies, but they relate pretty well. And you think about, you know, even in professional franchises, people that get paid a lot of money to play sports that you have, people that maybe in other organizations have kind of gotten complacent or lazy or got in trouble, whatever it is, and then they get moved to a different organization, and suddenly it's like, oh, well, they've. They've seen the light. Maybe individually, they made some changes, certainly. But I also believe that that that organization had a culture of excellence a certain way they did that.