Designing Your Best Version Possible Agency

Foreign. For those of you that don't know me, my name is Brent Kelly. I'm the president of the Sitkins Group. You may be familiar with Sitkins Group. We've been around for 40 years plus. I've been doing this a long time and working with independent insurance agencies. I am, I am super excited today to share with you this idea, this workshop of designing your best version possible agency. And I will tell you this idea, this mindset of best version possible is something that we ask ourselves all the time. In fact, this is what I want to ask you to think about at the start. This is the question. In fact, I'll ask you to think about this question and then I want you to type in the chat box an initial response of what comes to you. And here's the question, what do you believe the best version possible of an independent insurance agency is? What's the best version possible of an independent insurance agency? Maybe you have a phrase or an attribute or a characteristic, but when you think about best version possible of an independent insurance agency, what comes to your mind? Let you think about that for a second. And by the way, there's no wrong answers here. So if you type in a chat box, don't be worried that I'm going to say that's not right. It's your answer, not mine, your participation. So love to hear from you. Thriving. I see it. I probably won't see all the chat boxes, chat responses, thriving. I saw Advisor. I love that. For those of you that are coming in, I want you to think about this and type in the chat box. What, what's the best version possible of an insurance agency? What's, what's, what do you think of as I say that. So I love that people seek us out to do insurance. Right. Very cool. Allison. Agency of choice, Nancy. Efficiency, profitability, all in sync. And whether you type in the chat box or you're just thinking of it, this is going to be the question we're going to be addressing today. We're going to have an hour together. Hopefully you've got, if you registered and it was sent to you, you've got these awesome worksheets that go with it. If you don't, Bethany on our team will be able to put the link out there. So at least you have the downloads. You still have time to print. I will be asking you to write things down or certainly there should be things that I would hope you'd want to write down because there's going to be a lot of value shared in today's Session. Thank you, Bethany, for doing that. Now, the question of design your best version possible agency really started officially in that form of a question. About four years ago, we were at a agency leadership event in Atlanta, Georgia, the great city of Atlanta. In fact, it was me and Roger Sitkins, who's our namesake. And I'm sure that many of you know Roger have heard the name Roger Sitkins, an icon in the industry. And we were sitting there having a conversation, preparing for this agency leadership event. And I asked Roger this exact question. Roger, what's the best version possible of an independent insurance agency? What does it look like? What's the culture? What are the producers doing? How are they producing? What does the client experience look like? What's the growth of the agency? What's the selling process? What's the profitability? So a lot of these things that I was curious about, and it's interesting how life works, right? So that one question, which really was an innocent question, has transformed into a mindset that when we speak with agencies, one of the first things we talk about mentally is what does the best version possible mean to you? What does the best version possible mean to your team? And it's transformed into a movie that was created. You go to our website if you want more information, you can check it out. We went to Los Angeles last year and created a really cool movie about the best version possible. And some of you may already have this, but I have to do a promo here. We wrote a book called Best Version Possible. In fact, when we wrote this book, so many things we wanted to share with independent insurance agencies. And Bethany, if you could at some point too. And again, it's, if anybody's interested in getting a copy of the book, it's, you know, it's 10 bucks or less or whatever, get a copy of the book. You can get a link to go and check it out. It's sitkins.com bvp but we didn't set out that book to be title best version possible. But as we went through the content again and again, we realized that was the foundation, that was the through line. And what I'm going to be sharing with you today is the final transformation. I mean, it'll always be transforming to get better. But the last phase of this is the best version possible experience, which is a simplified and proven process for your agency. Right? What is the process? What is the experience that we've seen of best version possible agencies, Right? What does that look like? I want to ask you a question here too, because. And just if this has ever happened to you? Has anybody ever said to you or. Or maybe said to someone on your team or maybe you said to a team member, you've ever asked this question or ever, ever said the statement, you've got great potential? Have you ever heard someone say that to you? You've got great potential. Right. Or maybe you've said it to someone, oh, I see great potential in you. Yeah, Pat. I mean, it's something we hear all the time, right? You got great potential. And, you know, potential is a very interesting word. And here's why that. On one hand, potential should create great possibilities. Like, what's possible. Wow. Like, you got great potential. You can achieve amazing things. But on the other hand, potential can also maybe remind us of things that we have yet to accomplish or we wish we were further ahead. Right. That he or she had great potential or didn't live up to their potential. Right. So there's two sides of that. I want to share with you a personal story about 20 years ago about potential. And this will lead into a leadership conversation that we're going to have today together. I was a very new producer with an agency. And in fact, about two years in as a producer, I was newly married. We were expecting our very first child, which, by the way, she just went to college. So this is 20 years ago. So it's been a while. And since then, by the way, we've created four more, me and my wonderful wife. 20 years. So we've got five kiddos. But this is a long time ago. And so I actually went to a gas station to see a client. And you know, the client was at the gas station. I was going to see a client. I had to stop at the gas station to get gas. It was about a 15 mile drive. And I pulled in the gas station and I knew people had told me for years and even recently, like, oh, you've got great potential, Brent. A lot of potential in you. I see so much in you. But I knew the reality that deep down I was doing stuff that was nowhere near my potential. Not even close. Right. That I was living kind of a facade to a degree. And so I got to the gas station, I pulled out my debit card and that puppy was declined. So I pulled out credit card because that'll work. Unfortunately, that was declined as well. Then I pulled out another credit card and that was declined as well. So I began to realize. And you get the picture here. Right? And by the way, this is not the actual gas station, but it is a rendering of the actual gas station. I was at. But I realized the truth of my situation, right? That I was not a person that was saying, wow, look at this amazing potential you're tapping into. But that every day I was living a life of unfulfilled potential. And it was interesting because that began. There's a lot of powerful moments I think, that we have in life. Certain things that you remember. This was one of those for me because here I was, a young man in my early 20s, starting on this new career, newly married, right? Expecting the first child. I was raised by two really great parents. I was very blessed, went to a four year university, worked for a nice agency, and I went to this parking lot next to the gas station and for 30 minutes I wept. I mean, I just wept. And if you talk to my kids today or anybody knows me well, I don't really cry much, but I wept that day. And it wasn't just that I was broke. It is that I knew deep down I was broken. I was living a life of unfulfilled potential. I think all of us to some degree can feel that, hopefully not in this situation, but time to time. And that began a journey for me of personal and professional growth. This idea of what do I need to do to develop myself? And that wasn't a magic pill, right? This was a period of time, years and years. I am still learning, I am still listening today as best that I can. But there is a very powerful quote that I heard from the late, great Jim Rohn, my first real mentor that I would call a mentor. Never met him, but I listened to a bunch of his audio CDs and started to tap into some of this. And I love this quote. I want you to think about this. This is what he said. He said, don't wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don't wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don't wish for less challenge, wish for more wisdom, right? This idea that we're going to talk today and I'm going to speak to you and as a group of leaders on this call today, that for things to change, we have to change, right? There's got to be some things that we have to do to get better wherever we're at. And some of you are doing really well, some of you maybe are struggling in different areas, whether it's personally or with your agency. But this idea is that we've got to all get better. You know, it's really interesting and I'm going to get into these three things here in a second. But before I get There. It reminds me of something. There's something I want you to consider. Today. I ask you about your agency. What's the best version possible of your insurance agency? Right. I want you to think about this too, as a leader. And many of you have team members that you're responsible for, you work with. Right. You share influence. You're a leader. Here's a question. What are you doing as a leader to help members on your team become their best version possible? Right. It's one thing to say, hey, I'm going to strive to be my best version. Absolutely. But what are you doing to help others around you to help them become their best version possible as well? There's a recent study that just came out and it's from the. It's the best practices study. I'm sure if you type in yes in the chat box, if you've seen the recent best practice study, just came out a few weeks ago. Fantastic information put on by the Big I Reg Consulting are good friends at Reagan. I just saw Tom Duran last or just this week and do some stuff with Reagan, but they put on some great information, great material. There are a lot of very powerful things in that study. But the very beginning of the best practice, if you read through it, there was a question that was asked. I thought it was a really interesting question and make sure I get it right here. This was the question, what are the key elements to prospering as a privately held firm in today's market? Right. And some of you, again, probably were part of this study. And this question itself was asked to 45 specific agencies that were 20 million and larger. So these are the larger agencies, but these questions ring true whatever agency size you are. So what are the key elements to prospering as a privately held firm in today's marketplace? Now, you think about that question, and I don't know what answers come to your mind, but typically when I'm talking to agency leaders, one of the first things that you hear is, well, it's about growth, Right. Or it's technology. And those are important issues. Organic growth was fifth and technology was eighth. Right. So they were on the top 10, but they were not the top three. The top three. And by the way, this is obviously if you got your worksheets, you want to make sure you write these down. The top three were this number one People. People was the number one issue. By the way, I always joke to leaders, you know, leadership would be really easy if it wasn't for the darn people. Right. But people was number one. Number two, culture. Right? And we're going to talk about that today. Number three, leadership. So people, culture and leadership were the top three things. So to me, you'd go, well, gosh, that means that every agency, you know, majority of agencies understand this and they're probably doing a lot to improve and develop their people, which, by the way, is the number one asset you all have as independent insurance agency leaders, right? Your people. What are we doing to improve that? Here's what was a troubling statistical. And by the way, this is an average, right? So you may be higher, hopefully you're not lower. But, you know, you may have different answers. Here is there was a question that said, what percentage of the revenue of your agency do you invest in the development and training of your people? And the answer was 0.3%, 0.3% of the agency's revenue. Now, maybe you're trying to put your arms around that or your mind around that. What does that mean? Well, I'll give you this. In comparison, miscellaneous, which is miscellaneous we don't have a category for. It was 0.53, 0.53. And things we don't even know what they are, 0.3. And the actual people that will generate the results, the revenue in the agency. Right. It was very, very interesting. And so it just continues to get me to think about what are we doing to help serve people. Now, part of this is there's a cost to this, right? There's a financial cost. If we're not designing your best version possible agency. Right. If we're not investing in people, there. There is a cost, right? So the question is, what is it? What is the cost of not investing in my people? What does that look like? And I'm going to share with you three areas. And again, you can look in your worksheet on here. Number one is time. There is a cost associated with time, right. And type in the chat box, if you would, please play along with me here. How many of you in your agency have ever had an unproductive hour? Or at least you believe there was an unproductive hour at some point in the agency? Yes or no? Anybody ever had an unproductive hour? Yeah, I figured all the time. All the time. Hopefully not all the time. But yes, I mean, listen, they happen. And if you're human and you're a business that has humans in the business, it's going to happen. But the question is how often? Right? And is it something that's frequent to have unproductive hours? Well, let's think about the cost of this. First of all, understand this time is your only diminishing asset. That's it. Time is your only diminishing asset. You can get back stuff, you can earn back money in certain cases, you can win back or earn back relationships, but you can never get time. It's gone. Right? It's the only diminishing asset we have. Now think about it in terms of actual cost around this. If you look at a million dollars of agency cost in a year, and by the way, some of you, for agencies that are 5, 10, 15, 20, $30 million in revenue, your cost is way higher than that. But let's just look at a million dollars of cost for an agency. If you take an average American work year, which is around 2,000 hours, that's $500 an hour, you start to multiply that and you start to think about 5 million, 10 million, it could be 2,500 or $5,000 an hour. There's a huge cost to it. Now, certainly in regards to actual money and costs. In fact, and I'll mention this again, I only mentioned the book, but in the book we talk about this specific thing about how much money is left on the table. In fact, we typically see that most agencies, if you start to look at the scope of things, leave about 100 to $500,000 of net profit, not revenue profit on the table every single year. And you start to think about agency valuation, which by the way, is at a very high level of importance for agencies, obviously for obvious reasons. Right. You think about what that actually means when. Well, I'll talk more about this in a minute, but in today's marketplace, as crazy as it is, you're talking about a 15 times multiple. Sometimes you look at the agency valuation, that's a million and a half to seven and a half million dollars in that scope of money left on the table in regards to agency valuation. Right. And why? Because often we're not investing in our people. And then let's talk about the people themselves are actually developing the people. What does that look like, the cost of that? Well, first of all, you know, I asked you a little bit ago, are you as an agency leader thinking about this question of am I developing the best version possible of my people? What does that look like? Well, there's, there's wasted opportunity, right? There's wasted talent, unfulfilled potential, as I mentioned. Right. And you think about this, you talk to most agencies and remember the best practices study said the people was number one. Well, a big part of that is Attracting and retaining the best people. I've been to several events of the last few months. I'm around a lot of different agencies and this is one of the things that always comes up as well. It's really hard to find people, obviously. It's really hard to keep our best people true. Now again, there's not a magic bullet to this, but think about this for a second and I can relate this to college athletics. Now if you're not a college athletics fan, I'm sorry, but I think you'll get this. You think about college athletics. How do some of the the schools compete against some of the big boys? How do they recruit better talent? How do they keep talent without going to the transfer portal portal in today's world, which by the way happens in lift outs, right? These things happen all the time. Well, there's not a magic pill, but if you talk about some reasons why athletes go to these schools is because they'll say this. I felt like I was a true part of the team. I was part of a family and they developed me. They had a plan for my development, right? They had a plan for my development. And that makes a big deal of being able to attract. Hey, we have a plan for you. And also keeping that we want to continue to develop. You get not a magic pill, but it's important. Now I want to share with you, I mentioned obviously with the best version possible experience and I want to share with you what this looks like. You know, Roger Sitkins and I have had so many conversations over the last several years. In this past year and a half or so, we got really serious about asking ourselves the question what can we do? You know, we work with private clients. We have agency members from all over the country. But what can we do to take our game up a higher level? What can we do to make a process simplified so that agencies can really execute upon it? Right? Because one of the biggest things you'll see is have you ever had a professor or a teacher ever in your life? Again, maybe it was a coach, I don't know, someone in your life that they were more worried about how smart they sounded than versus how great you would actually execute on what it is they were teaching, right? Like, oh, look how. No, that doesn't transfer. That's not transformation. So Roger and I talked and talked about this and worked on things. And this past February we were in Cape Coral, Florida, which by the way, please keep thoughts and prayers continue for all the folks in southwest Florida, including my team that's based down there but we were having a, we were finishing up a sales mastery and this was an elite program. The average commission by producer is 1.1 million, right? So producers with big books. And we were sitting there, we're thinking about why are these producers succeeding? Why are the best agencies succeeding? What's the roadmap that they're following now? We have a big breakthrough I want to share with you. So hopefully you're ready for this because this is going to blow your mind. All right, you ready for this? This is what, this is what after months and months and months and many, many hours of discussion that we've came up with. So here we go. Ready? This, this is the best version possible experience. Two water bottles and a salt and pepper shaker. All right, Roger's probably going to listen in and laugh about this. There's, there's obviously I'm being tongue in cheek here, but listen, Leonardo da Vinci said it pretty well. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. And we realize is there's four things. There's four areas for agencies for growth and development that they must follow. There's a roadmap, not 174 but four. So I'll give you, and this is on your next page. You can actually fill this in. We'll get a little more serious. Now. What are these four things? The four areas of design your best version possible agency are these four. Number one is alignment. And alignment is simply this. Do we have the same goal with different roles, right? Like do we have the same goal as an agency with different roles? And today I'm going to take you very deep. This will be the focus today because without alignment, none of this other stuff nearly has the weight or traction that you want. We figured this out. Like this is. In fact we had a meeting today. People go, what's. It's alignment. If we're not aligned, if we're not communicating up front, we never get the traction. The other stuff. So number one is alignment. Number two, green zone. Now some of you may have an idea what this means. Others, what does that mean? I got to share with you. We have a little, little visuals we use with our agency members. These are poker chips. We have green on one side and red on the. And here's the idea of green zone. Green zone is very simple. Are my producers spending enough time in money making activities? It's that simple. In fact, the metric that we use, one of the most underlooked metrics in agencies is tss. Tss? Time spent selling. You can't score points if you're not in the game. I'll give you a very quick example of this and hopefully you, you can understand. Again, I know I'm a sports guy, so I use sports analogies, but they work for me. Hopefully they'll work for. Okay, imagine it's game seven of the NBA championship. Game seven. Everything's on the line right now. I'm going to go back to my favorite player in my days, Michael Jordan. You all know who Michael Jordan is. Maybe it's Steph Curry. I don't care who it is in today's world. But the best player on the floor whose goal is to score points. Right. For their team. We're three minutes into the game, three minutes, and Michael Jordan or Steph Curry is like, I gotta check out. Are you hurt? Are you injured? Are you injured? Are you hurt? Are you in foul trouble? Nope, I just have some things I need to tend to. So they go to the bench and they realize that some of the towels are on the ground. So they want to pick those up. And they see people on the stands that pay good money to be there. They figure they should take some pictures with them. Right? Obviously that sounds crazy, but too many producers are not on the court when their job is to score points. And if we don't get really serious about this and get laser focus on Green Zone or time spent selling. And by the way, there's four money making activities if you want to write this down. There's four things that producers should be doing. Sales, relationship management, proactive continuations, and pipeline development. Everything else is a distraction. Right? So Green Zone is a focus that if we can get. And by the way, to give you an idea, and this is a high level overview, but it's important. Agencies that get really focused as a team and certainly with their producers, we see a 25% in productivity, which by the way, is results only by this. Right. That doesn't even include the other stuff that we'll get into. All right, so phase three or the next step of the best version possible experience is retention and referrals to retain and referral, refer, by the way, my guess is, and you can type in the chat box if you want that retention is probably not your number one problem in your agency. It may be a problem somewhere, but it's not the number one problem. The interesting thing is this. Why is it that 90% of our clients renew on average, which is a pretty cool business, by the way, but less than 10% of those clients actively refer. Now think about that 20%. I'm sorry. Yeah, I mean, of our clients, we look at 90% in 24, 90% of our clients renewal, but less than 10% actively refer. And I'll talk more about this in a minute, but this idea is, it's about the client experience. Are we setting up with the end in mind that our best clients want to help us? If you ask most people, are referrals important for your business? Yes. Do you close a higher amount of referrals than others? Yes. Do you have deeper relationships? Do your account managers like your referral based business? Yes. Then are you earning, asking for them? No. So shouldn't we have this be part of the process? Right, so that's the next step. And then number four is to obtain, which this is where most agencies start and for good reason. Hey, we got to find more clients, we got to get more clients. But obtain is deeper than this. Obtain is understanding the true points of differentiation in my agency. What do we really stand for? How do we become a Category 1? And what is our set offense? What is the playbook we run that we can replicate throughout? Because too often. And one more sports analogy is, could you imagine a football team going out to the, you know, out to the huddle and they all look at each other and go, let's figure it out. Now, you may have one or two really star athletes who just break the line and score anyway because they're really good. But that's a really hard thing to replicate. Now again today, I'm going to take you deep in alignment and the reason why, with the hour that we have together, I want to give you as much as I can, because without this area, without you thinking about this area, these other things are never going to come to fruition at the level that you want. All right, so let's start with the line, I love this quote by Jim Collins and hopefully you've read the book Good to Great. It's pretty old now at this point, but a great quote. Building a visionary company. Company requires 1% vision and 99% alignment. I'm going to ask a question here in the chat box. How many of you have ever had a vehicle you've been driving in or maybe you've seen a vehicle on the road that's out of alignment? You ever had that? Yes or no? You had a vehicle or seen a vehicle out of alignment? There's a wheel that's off. Anybody have that? Yes or no? Allison? Thank you. Yes. Yes. Yeah, I think most of us have. Thank you, Travis. Thank you, Aaron. Yeah, most times we have or at least have been part of that or seen that. So here's my next question. Once you type in the chat box as well. So here's the question. When a vehicle is out of alignment, what happens when a vehicle is out of alignment? By the way, no wrong answers here. No wrong answers. Just whatever you think. What. What happens when a vehicle is out of alignment? Any thoughts? What do you think? What happens? Sideways or tire wear? Yeah. Drives the wrong. Hopefully it doesn't go the entire wrong way, Brian. But yeah, it could swerve right or move over. Wear and tear. Yeah, absolutely. And now hopefully you know where I'm going with some of this. It ruins the vehicle. Yeah, absolutely. When a vehicle's out of alignment, it creates substantial problems, certainly. And the problems get bigger and bigger. At some point when we look at an agency, we look at the four wheels as this. You don't have to overcomplicate things. There's sales, there's service leadership. Right. And there's admin ops. Four wheels. And just like a car, if these wheels are out of alignment, they're not communicating well together. They don't have the same goal with different roles. Understanding that it creates friction, it creates noise, it creates that we swerve. And by the way, the longer we wait as an agency leader to address this, does the problem get better or worse? It gets worse. And at some point it gets really, really costly. So here's something that's not in your worksheets. I would ask you to write down. This is a really important thing I learned years ago. I try keep it in mind. It's important for agencies. A problem left unattended will become a crisis. A problem left unattended will become a crisis. So if there's a problem in some of these areas, we need to understand what it is and acknowledge it and begin to take action. So what I want to do is I want to take you through alignment, some different areas of alignment that you can take with you from this workshop to begin to think about your best version possible. Agency in terms of alignment. Right. To get focused in this particular area. And I want to share with you a few agency stories and the stories that I share agencies that we had the pleasure to work with. I will do my best to protect names for privacy, but I do want to share with you because there's some great lessons to be learned that you can learn as an agency leader from some of these stories. This is an agency in the east coast that we work with. Fantastic agency. They've been with us for over Four years now and have had some great success with. When we started working with them, they were like a lot of agencies. Probably on this call, they were doing pretty well. I mean, from the outside world, like, hey, you guys are doing all right. To give an idea about a $25 million revenue agency, Life's pretty good, right? Not too bad. We start to talk with the sales leader and the CEO, and one of the things that they were struggling with is clarity. I don't know that we're clear enough on some of the things that we need to be. And therefore, there's a bit of misunderstanding throughout the agency. We're growing a little bit, but we're. It's kind of like you're running with a parachute, right? Because we're not clear on exactly what we're trying to do and try to accomplish. And so there's three questions that I want to address around this. Number one is, and you can address as an agency leader, where are you today? Seems like an obvious question, but we're going to talk about that. How did you get there? Wherever you are, you got there somehow. And where do you really want to go? Right. What does that look like? So I want to start with the first question, which is, where are you today? And again, it may sound like a silly question, like, well, I'm. I'm here. I'm in my office. We're at this revenue. Whatever it is. But I think this is a really important concept to understand because Dan Sullivan, and we have this quote in our book as well. But Dan Sullivan is the founder of Strategic Coach, and you may have heard of Dan Sullivan, but has some great. A great thought leader. He says something very simple but very powerful. He says this. All progress. All progress starts by telling the truth. All progress starts by telling the truth. And too often I see agency, when it comes to alignment of where we are, in many cases may be lying to themselves to a degree. And in fact, one of the producers with this agency that I referenced, he has a great quote. He said it, one of our sales mastery programs, he said, you know, the minute you tell yourself you're being 100% honest is probably your first lie. And I always love that quote because it's true. Right. As humans, we have that. So one of the things that you have to do as an agency is say, where do we potentially have blind spots? Or where do we potentially have traps? Either that we actually know that our traps are blind spots, or maybe it is a true blind spot, meaning we didn't even know it was there. So I do want to reference and again just this is in the book and that's why the slide is up there. In chapter two of our book we talk about seven agency traps. The most common traps that we see agencies fall into now. Are there others? Yeah, probably. But these seven really cover most of them and with, with this agency that we're working with, there were three traps in particular of the seven that really jumped out. In fact I would say they're probably the most common. So, so I want to share them with you of these traps and what they may look like and again get a feel maybe if this is something that your agency is struggling with as far as being honest or being clear on some of these things that may be hindering your growth and designing your best version possible. Agency number one, the biggest trap that they had we talked about initially was, and I mentioned this with Green Zone they had too many part time producers. And we mean that part time producers that, that instead of having a full time producer doing producer stuff, they had a majority of their team that were part time producers and they couldn't figure out why they weren't getting the results. Now here's something you may want to jot down with this is that we never want profitable producers to subsidize or unprofitable producers. We never allow a profitable producer to subsidize their unprofitable producers. And the big part of this is listen, we have to be very focused on getting our producers out in the game. And, and they've been very intentional about this over the last few years. In fact this year they had one of the greatest growth years at 15 organic growth. And a big part of that is just getting out of the office. Right. In fact, I'm not going to share it here because it's going to reflect on, on the screen. But they have a, we, we teach very much in our programs about a producer's perfect schedule and high performance teams and how to make. But they have a mirror that they gave to every agency office that said at the very top, very top I said is this your best version possible? Right. Mindset. And in the bottom it said this producers, if it's Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday between 9am and 3pm you should not be reading this mirror. Love it. Right? It's part of it. You should be out doing producer stuff. And that was one of the traps I think sometimes agencies aren't fully aware of. They've got part time producers, too many of them. The second trap that may be true with your agency maybe not is ignoring the power of 80:20 now in the chat box, I'll be interested. I'm going to ask you a series of questions here. So. So stay engaged with me here. Here's my question for you. How many of you know 8020 or know what 8020 is or Pareto's principle, you've heard or you know of 80 20? Type in yes or no. Yes, Nancy. Yes, Allison. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Cool. That's what I expected. Now here's my next question. How many of you know your numbers of your agency of 80 20, you know the breakdown of your clients in a form of 80 20, yes or no. Any more yeses? Very cool. Now here's the next question and maybe we'll get some more yeses here. This is a bright crowd here. I love this is how many of you are executing strategies based on maximizing the power of 81 that you actually leverage it. You have specific processes and strategies that based around what 8020 can mean for you and your agency. Greg, you're trying. Yes, a little bit. This is the struggle, right? And there's again, hopefully, no offense to this, this is just what happens. There's a gap between what we know often and what we actually do. Right. Because part of it could be distraction. We've gotten away from it. But in the example with the agency that we work with in the east coast, they became very clear on this, that it became part of their culture and DNA. 80 20, 80 20, how are utilizing? What does it mean for us or how do we execute at a higher level? And to give you an idea of what's meant for them, and this is just again, one example of this is they began to realize 8020 was true and real for them. And by the way, if you run the report, we've run thousands. It is, it is for most agencies, some form of it. There's a predictable imbalance. And this agency, what's really interesting is they created a target account size. Now, you don't have to do this, but they did target account size, realizing the power of the top 20% and a minimum account size, realizing that there's a lot of clients that take a lot of time, energy and effort that producers shouldn't be working on. They have a select business unit, but not the producers themselves. And what's interesting is they had producers that were frustrated and said, well, I still have. I should be able to write any account I want, any time I want. And they allowed that for a while and then they got more serious about. It was interesting As I was talking to the sales leader, sales leader recently, and he said was very interesting is that the accounts that were on the minimum account or lower, they were trying to get in, they were closing about 25 to 30% of those accounts on average. The accounts that were the target account size that they really wanted, they got very serious about, guess how much they were closed. 75 to 80%. They had three times the size of account and closing three times as many. Why they lived 80, 20. They got very serious about it. And the last thing I want to share with you is a trap that I mentioned before in Optane, but this agency was dealing with it and we see it very common with agencies is they have no set offense or at least not a true offense. You could replicate understanding who are our future ideal clients? Like who do we really want, why? And what's our strategy around to attract them and to be able to replicate that with a set offense for the agency. I give you success and one more success of this because again, success leaves clues. So I want these to hopefully be clues for you to think about and design your best version possible agency. But this agency, the past three years, and again they're 30 million now, but they start around 25 million. And they realized this, that like, wow, we have a set offense, all of a sudden we're writing more broker of record letters. Now we don't teach specific broker of record or agent of record. We're not against it. It's a great way to do business. But here's what we know about broker of record letters. A BOR or AOR is the natural outcome of a great process, right? When you have a great process, it becomes a natural outcome. Last three years, this agency, to give you a perspective, has written over $1 million in new business revenue on broker of records. Wasn't the only thing they've done, but they've done a million in revenue on broker of records. Right? So again, what's your process? Are you trapped in the fact that your processes look copy, quote, pray? Right? So just think about some of those things because it's important with clarity. And the other part is to understand, well, how did you get where you are, wherever you are? Good, bad, indifferent, ugly, Wonderful. Here's something I want you to to write down or make a note of. Certainly. And this isn't in your worksheet, but it's really powerful. Your current business model is perfectly designed to achieve the results you're currently achieving. Whatever results you're currently getting is perfectly designed from the business model. You've created. Now, maybe you love your business model. Great, fantastic. But whatever it is, I don't like the results. Well, look at your business model, right? What does that look like? Because the bottom line is that you have to ask yourself the question from wherever you're at today, and if you're attending this workshop, where do we really want to go now? Maybe you've got a roadmap already. Maybe you talked about this for your team, or maybe you don't, or maybe you're uncertain. When I talk to most agency leaders and I say, hey, what's frustrating you? I can get a list of things that are bothering them. We're frustrated with this. We don't like that that's in our way. We want to change that. Understood. But if I ask an agency, what do you really want? Like, where are you really going and why is that important? Why should your teammates care? Usually it's like, well, lots of stuff, right? There isn't a clear. A clear answer in this. So it's really important to understand what that looks like. I got to share from this agency that I've referenced a few times here. Some things I thought were really cool. Number one is this. They ended up creating a sales creed based on this best version possible model. But it became part of their DNA and culture. And it says here, I know this a little bit small. Starting today, I strive to become the best, best version possible of me and help my company go from good to great. Right? So just to have that mindset, that model, that purpose. And then based on our coaching and some of the strategies that we work with them on, they created a model based on a pyramid, the best version pyramid. And this one's for their sales team, but they have one for the agency as well, by the way, at the very top. Personal accountability, Right. That we're going to own everything that we do. And so this has been a critical thing for this agency. At the end of the day, here's a question. This is in your worksheet. Does your current direction match your desired destination? Whatever direction you're on right now as an agency, does that direction lead you to your desired destination of your best version possible and your best version possible agency? It might. And obviously, this last year, some of the market conditions, maybe you're on a pretty good track, right? But what's going to happen next year and the year after? Right? So here's something you can put in. This is something you can do on your own time. It's in your worksheet. But look back Five years ago. Look back three years ago and look at today and plot your revenue numbers and begin to create that line. That's your trend, right? That's the trend you're on. And a lot of times I'll see agencies that go, well, we want to be this in five years. We want to be this in 10 years, which is great, but their trend is this. And they want this, right? And so wait a second, like, something's got to change because there's a gap, right? There's a gap. And by the way, we love acronyms@ SIG. And so if you want one, here you go, here's the gap. What are your goals and plans for your growth and profit? What are the goals and plans for your growth and profit? Because that quote, direction and destination came from Pastor Andy Stanley, and he has even a better one. I love this. It's your direction, not your intention, that determines your destination. It's your direction, not your intention. There is a very powerful drug sometimes that it sweeps all of society, but definitely the independent insurance world, because we see it. And that drug is Hopium. I hope that next year's better. I hope this person improves. I hope whatever. But it's your direction, not your intention, that determines your destination, right? So keep those things in mind. I want to go deeper into alignment and talk about culture. Culture is a bit of a buzzword, right? Like, how often have you heard the word culture in the last two years? Like a billion, right? Everyone talks about culture. Well, first of all, what is culture? What is it? Well, the way we define it at Sitkins is this. Culture is the language and behaviors that are normal in your agency. You want to make a note of this? Write this down. What's culture? Well, culture is the language and behaviors that are normal in your agency. If your agency could talk, what would it say? If your agency could move, where does it go? Right? I mean, just understanding the language and behaviors that are normal in your agency today. That's the culture, right? That's what it is. And here's something I want you to think about. People. People typically think about culture and want to make a transformation. We want to change. We want to become a best version possible agency. Well, that requires people doing different stuff than they did yesterday, right? Nothing changes if nothing changes. Well, let me ask you this. In the chat box, yes or no, do you believe that people on your team love change? Yes or no? Do people love change? Some people might, but I'm getting there is a no with an exclamation point. Nope, Nope. Nope. Yeah, I mean, generally, no. Now, of course it will depends on the change right now, obviously, and I'm being a bit tongue in cheek here, but just play along if, you know, if you got off this webinar and you said, hey, listen, everybody, we're going to make an agency change. And the change is that starting next week, every Friday, you all get $1,000 bonus would ever be. I love change. Change. Rock on. Change. Right? Now, here's the thing. I want you to think about this. People don't resist change. People resist being changed. There's a difference. People don't resist change. People resist being changed because you got to change your habits, got to change your behaviors, and that' so one of the biggest things to see with agencies is you could have some great ideas. But if you can't get other people to buy into those ideas and execute those ideas, they're just a bunch of ideas, right? They're just a bunch of ideas. So you got to think about this as an agency leader. All right, as an agency leader, here's what can happen to you. Too often, I'm not going to pick on you because I am just like you in this phrase, right? From many of you. I'm generalizing here, but I think this will probably hit home for some of you. One thing I love about agency leaders is you have lots of ideas and you get excited about ideas, right? And there's a new idea every week or every month because you read a book, you attend a seminar, you talk to a friend, right? Or someone in the industry, and you come back to your agency, you say, listen, I got a new idea. I got a new thing we're going to do. This is the new thing. And here's what happens. After several weeks and months and years of you doing this, right? Your team knows what's coming. Oh, she or he read this or saw this again. Here they come and they wait for you to walk out of the room. When you do a meeting, door closes, Is he gone? Is she gone? They look at each other and say, don't worry, this too shall pass. We can go back to doing what we were doing before, right? We don't have to change anything, right? Because it's just a new idea. Someone's had a whiplash on there. It's like, right? New idea all the time. This is an agency we work with currently, one of our private client members, a great agency partner. And I want to share the story because this involves sales and service. We did a production training for their team, had some great Momentum. Great conversation. The producers were all fired up. There was kind of a major problem though. Anybody guess the problem? It's nice. The producers were all fired up. The service team didn't attend the training. They might not be as fired up about some of the things we talked about. Right? They didn't know some of the things we talked about. And so we realized that with training. One of the reasons why training doesn't work is because not everybody gets it. It's like sporadic partial training. There's certain people here. If these two people get it, we're fine. If this department gets it, we're fine. But we never have a holistic approach to it, which is really hard to do what? To improve culture and get buy in. So with this agency, we realized this very quickly and began to have some sessions with the account managers and began to integrate this. And right now we run monthly sales meetings with agencies where we put the service team and the sales team together to talk about some of these things because they're important. And what happened, which is really interesting, is that it went from a huge amount of resistance from the service team telling us, you can't do this to them actually being part of the design and leading some of the meetings, telling the producers to do certain things, to be able to have a little more control, saying, don't interrupt me, I got it right. Some of these things are really, really important. Right? And with this agency right now, their budget for organic growth this year was about 11 and a half percent. They're currently 11% over that. That. And I asked the sales leader, I said, what's been the biggest caveat? What's been the biggest cause of this? He was very clear. He said, we communicate better together as a team than we ever have before. Like, you know, you think about sales and service, oftentimes there's not only resistance, sometimes there's like animosity, unfortunately in agencies, right? Like we're honestly producers, we're right a piece of business. And service team's like, ah, man, I got more work to do. That is not alignment. That's a high maintenance team versus a high performance team. Right? And maybe that's a question to ask yourself right now in sales and service, do we have a high performance team where we are encouraging, working each other to work well, work well together? Right. The production team's accountable to production. The service team handles the service stuff. But we're communicating together for the client experience. There's a difference, right? There's a difference. And here's something I want you to think about this. This proverb's been around for a while. I love it. If you want to go fast, just go alone, go by yourself or get a couple people to go. If you want to go far, we've got to build alignment to go together. Does it take a little more work? Yes. But long term, it's really, really powerful because there's two aspects to this. There's culture and there's process. When you think about an agency, both are important. But when you think about culture and process, you look at these two things next to me. Culture and process. Culture already mentioned language and behaviors that are normal in the agency process. The thing that we're actually doing. When most agencies desire to make a change, a transformation, what do you think they typically start with the culture, why we're doing something, the importance of it, or they start with the process. Here's the new renewal process, here's the new technology that you're going to be using. What do you think they start with? Culture, process. It's usually processing, right? But I want to challenge you all here. To get greater buy in, we've got to invest more time, energy or effort on the culture. Right? And this is in your worksheet. You can fill this in. It doesn't have to be exactly 80%, but the majority of the time, if we're going to implement meaningful change or transformation or agency to actually get some of the buy in, start with why, as Simon Sinek said, why does it matter? Why should you care? Why do our clients care? And speak that. Then you can begin to introduce more of the process part of it. This is actually how we're going to do some of this to where ultimately it's a simplified and proven processes that support the culture of your best version possible agency. It's the simplified improvement process. It's all reinforced. And you're going to continue to talk about culture. But now your process has reinforced that. And what does that do for you? It gets something that's one of the most challenging things for agencies. Buy in. I get you buying now. This is. I got to share a personal picture here. Some of you may chuckle. That's okay. This is my family many years ago. In fact, I'm this guy right here. That's me. Look at all that dark brown hair. Oh, man. The bowl cut was good too, right? About 40 years ago. You know, sometimes your mom or your dad or someone important in your life, they say something to you when you're a kid and it's one ear out the other and then you get older and you go, man, that was really smart. My mom used to say something I didn't understand until recently. Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still. Too many times you see an organizational leadership and agency leadership, it's. If we just, we just tell them enough times, look, we'll convince them. Maybe they do it because they have to for a while. Those are also the people that leave. Right. First is saying, what can we do to connect, right? Not convince, but connect. Another personal picture here. This is me and my daughter. This is my oldest daughter about five years ago. She's now in college, but she was getting ready to go into high school and she loved playing basketball. I played basketball my whole life. Loved the game, had some success playing the sport. She was doing pretty good. She was an 8th grader going into high school and we're out in the court and I was helping her with her shooting form. I said, do this, do this. What do you think a teenage daughter said to her dad? When you try to correct her form, some of you are smiling. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever, dad. Whatever, dad. Now, about an hour later, a true story. My neighbor walks by walking his dogs. My neighbor happens to be a basketball coach. He says almost the exact same thing as me. I swear to God, it was the same thing I just said an hour before. And my daughter now goes, oh, like this. Oh, I see my feet like this. I sat there, I said, wait a second, I just said this. Why did he have a greater impact than me? Third party credibility, right? So here's what I want to help you to with buy and there's different ways you can do this. Number one, do you have alignment and credibility with your own leadership team? It starts there, by the way. Way right. I got five kiddos. My wife and I have five incredible kiddos. If mom says one thing and dad says something else, the kids figure it out. Same with your team, right? Same with your team. So understand leadership, alignment. But also what about champions in your agency, people in your community that buy in your vision, your culture of what you do, have them help support and reinforce it. What we do at Sitkins is a big part of this. Admittedly, this may be self serving, but it's true. We want to help you get greater buy in with your, with your team members, right? Oh, that's what they're saying too. It must work. So look for credibility when you get buy in, which leads to, I believe, the most important thing of all for alignment in your agency. One of the hardest things to do one of the most important things for your agency alignment is this focus. I've already talked about this too shall pass. But so often agencies lose focus. And I got to show this picture. This is another one of our private client members we love to work with. Great group. I didn't explain this picture because you're probably going to be very confused of why I took that picture. And I don't blame you. This agency's in the Midwest. And again, another really good agency that did some. Still doing some incredible things. I'll share some numbers here with you in a second. But one of their struggles where they have lots of ideas, lots of people doing lots of stuff, a lot of people run in different directions. They were running really, really hard, but they got to a cap in their agency, about 25 million. They started to realize, like, we feel like we're moving harder, but I don't know that we really gain as much traction. In fact, that's where this, this picture came from. We talked about this idea that you could, you can move a lot of different directions, but you come out and all you are is unhappy. Right. So what can you do to begin to foster some of this? Now I want to reinforce some of this with numbers. And again, I want to keep this agency. I won't disclose the name, but I, I do want to show the numbers because it's really powerful. In fact, I'm going to shut my video down just so you can see this better. I mentioned they were looking to get to 25 million. They surpassed that. In fact, we started working with them in 2019. In 2020, they did get over 25 million. But a big part of this was getting the foundation right. Remember I said you can go fast or you can go far. And some people get frustrated. Oh, yeah. Well, they had to redo some things. They had to have some difficult conversations and they had to reassess what they were doing. But they still had a very nice net profit. 2021, they jumped to 28 million with a 16.2 net profit. And they basically tripled their growth, started to get some really good momentum and they just finished their fiscal year. This year they run on. On the third quarter of the calendar year is the end of their fiscal year. Their goal was to get to 30 million was their stretch goal. And they just succeeded. 32, 6. Now, here's something really important with this and you can put a bunch of numbers. Oh, it's numbers. It's numbers. Remember I said how important agency valuation is to most of you. Just think about this For a second. In fact, if you want to write a another line on the right of this, I just want to put this into perspective. And I'm not even going to use a 15 times multiple, which is very real. Let's use 12, right? If you use 12 as a multiple and what valuation, how important this is in 2020? 43.2 million in valuation. 2021, 54 million in valuation. 2022 over 100 million. And I would tell you, I want to make sure that you all understand this. Okay, well that's numbers. But how and why? Well, it's the power of focus. It's the power of saying what's going to be most important. There's a visual we love to use, something you can take back with you and think about what you're doing in your agency. It's a simplify and focus iceberg. What must we simplify so that we can better focus on what really matters? What must we simplify to focus on what really matters? And so often we'll see agencies that are doing really well, but truthfully, they're semi successful. And what I mean by that is there's a whole higher level of them they don't even know, right? And maybe they can sort of visualize it. They're not sure how to get there. And a part of this is because they're working on so many things, right? It's the trivial many versus the vital few. And for you to have a best version possible agency, you've got to begin to focus on what actually matters, what drives results, right? And so I want to challenge you to think about this for a second. What in your agency actually is driving behaviors and results in your agency? And what are you doing that's just creating a lot of noise? We were doing as an agency, as a company at Sitkins, doing some work with a consultant a few weeks back. And that was one of the things that they ask about above all else. If you were talking to an agency for 15 seconds, what would you say? Track and measure what actually gets visible results reduce or eliminate everything else. I mean. Oh, that's too simple. Think about it though. It starts with the thought process. I'll give you a story of this that I think is a great example. I'm sure all of you have heard of Steve Jobs, right? The late CEO of Apple. He was having a conversation with Mark, I forgot his name. Mark Parker, he's a CEO of Nike, was the CEO of Nike. And Mark Parker was recapping the story of his conversation with Steve Jobs and I thought it was really interesting. He said they were sitting there. He goes, I didn't ask Steve Jobs for advice, but he gave it to me anyway. He said, well, what did he say? And he said, well, you know, you all at Nike makes some incredible stuff, like beautiful stuff, top of the line stuff. He goes, but you also make a lot of crap. He goes, just stop making the crap and you'll be incredible, right? And I thought about that with agencies like you do a lot of great stuff, you do a lot of stuff, but what actually gets results. And so we created the best version possible. That's what we've designed it for, right? That's what we designed it for. Listen, there's four things you just got to stay focused on long enough to get the results. Some of those things that I shared with you, they're very possible for your agency. And wherever you're doing, there's another level for your agency, but there's four areas of your agency. Transformation, alignment, Same goal, different goals. Obviously I explained that today the different areas of alignment and one of the things that we do with agencies is we allow your entire agency, the client facing people of your agency to all understand a similar message, right? To have a holistic approach to development and training. But we got to do that to get alignment. Secondly is green zone. Let's get our producers the next part of this roadmap to get focused, to just get out of the game or get in the game and get out of the office, right? And do the right things, get the right habits and behaviors to do that. Number three is understand the power of 8020 and to to leverage it. The top 20% of your clients give you 80% of your revenue. What must we do to create a world class continuation process and experience that earns and generates referrals at a high level. And let's get focused on it and lastly is to obtain to create a true set offense that makes you a category of one in the in the independent insurance marketplace that you truly are. A category of one that you walk your clients through a process that no one else has and can do. And those are the four steps. Now simple yeah, to understand, but not always easy. Alignment, rowing in the same direction. Producer productivity. Understanding the power of 80:20 to retain and to replicate and to truly have a set office to a set offense that you can unleash to the marketplace. It's extremely powerful, right? It starts with alignment. Right? It starts with alignment. Then we build this in. Now we are launching the best version possible experience this year, January 2023, right. So we're about two months away. I'm not going to ask you anything more. This isn't some hard in your face sales pitch, but here's what I will tell you. We believe in what we do. We love what we do. We love to help agencies get results. If you want to learn more about this process, if you want to, we can learn more about your agency and what we can do to help you. There's a no obligation, there's no cost, a strategy call. And we try to use technology to make it look really cool. So you can use this QR code, right? It's in your worksheet as well. Or you can go to our website or Bethany's going to put in the link here that you can do that again. It's a 30 minute strategy call. We want to learn more about your agency. What are some of your frustrations? What are your challenges? I want to share with you how our process works with your agency and determine if there's a fit. That's it, right? If there's a fit, great. If you're an agency that desires growth, if you desire simplicity, if you desire to build a culture that is unique in the marketplace, to attract and to retain the highest level talent, that's what I help you do. We've worked for 40 years with agencies. It's what we do. It's our passion. So you can use this barcode, you can click on the worksheet to have a call. And we love, we'd love to have an opportunity just to get to know you better. I want to leave you with two thoughts, two more thoughts. And part of this is around regrets. And I tell you, I was at a meeting about three and a half years ago and I had someone that was talking to me. It's like, listen, do you have any regrets? I was like, well, I don't know, I don't like to use that word. I think we always learn. And he said, but do you ever think you're gonna look back someday and maybe wonder if. And I said, well, maybe. He said, can I tell you the definition of hell on earth? And I said, well, that sounds awful, but sure, right? So he said, this is it. And everybody said, he goes, the definition of hell on earth is this the last day on this earth. You come face to face with a person that you could have become if only. And I was like, oh my gosh, right? And that's what happens. There's too many if onlys or someday. And you know, I can reference this to it. And this is. I. This is not an actual event. I stole this from the Internet. But I don't tell the story because there's a very powerful thing that happens with regret and waiting. And my brother, my oldest brother, fantastic guy. We were at a swim meet about, I don't know, five, six years ago, and we're at a swim meet. My brother comes back from the concession stand, and he's got a bag of chips and a hot dog and a cola. And I thought nothing of it. I didn't think any of it. But he looks at me and he says, brent, see this? Yes, I do. He goes, you're not going to see that much longer. And I said, really? What's up? And he goes, I'm getting in shape. I'm going to start exercising, going to start eating better, going to get in shape. I said, cool. Now, I got to give you a reference point here, because this is the point of the story. This was the week before 4th of July. It was the last week of June. Okay, Last week of June. And I said, that's awesome, Brian. I'm proud of you. I said, when are you getting started? And he said, after the holiday. And I said, oh, after the fourth. Congratulations. That's great. He said, oh, no, no, no, no. Really busy summer. The kids are doing this and this. I'm talking after Labor Day, Labor Day. It's like two months away. Now, here's my question for all of you. You can answer in the chat box if you'd like. Do you think my brother actually started this fitness in shape thing that he was going to do after Labor Day? Yes or no? Yes or no? No, you're right. Now, again, by the way, he has since. So I'm going to give him credit. And he knows I tell this story. He didn't. And here's why. There is a very powerful and a truthful law that happens in the marketplace. It happens everywhere. The law of diminishing intent. The law of diminishing intent simply says this. The longer you wait to do something you know you should do, the less likely it is that you'll ever actually do it. I'll say it again. The longer you wait to do something you know you should do, right, the less likely it is that you're ever going to actually do it. Now, I don't know that you need to work with Sitkins. That's not my approach. We think we can help you. But if there's something today that hit you that we need to take our first step, if it's really important, like two months from now. Why would it not be important today? I never understand that, like, oh, it's really important that I do this is it. Yeah. It's so important that I'm going to start next year. Right. Like, and by the way, your next year starts today, right? It starts today. Listen, I want to thank you all because here's the deal. I asked at the beginning what's possible. You are agency leaders. You have influence. There is absolutely a best version possible of your agency and you and your team members that's waiting for you to arrive. People are looking at you saying, please help me, lead me, get me better. We are striving, we are looking for leaders that want to make a difference. I know you wouldn't be one of those if you weren't on this workshop and we applaud you. So thank you all. I'm technically two minutes past an hour. I just started a couple minutes late. But again, this, this barcode is on your worksheet. It's on the slide here. You also are going to be getting an email after this to thank you for being part of this webinar and also the link to schedule a strategy call as well with one of our coaches. So, hey, thank you all so much. I appreciate being part of this. We want to help make an impact in your life in any way possible and I wish you all the best in your success. Go live your best version possible. Thank you. The Agent Leader podcast is brought to you by the fine folks of the RoughNotes company. They are publishers of the insurance industry's leading magazine and technical insurance content. Roughness Magazine profile says 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 at roughnotes. 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