Roger Sitkins explains how consulting transformed his agency. Role clarity lets staff focus on their main job. He blocks time for business development because accounts naturally churn. High-Performance Team meetings reduced interruptions and improved how the agency prepares for sales.
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I know that making change inside any organization is challenging and nothing happens overnight. It doesn't go as quickly as you want, but you have to kind of make a focus and effort towards it. And I will admittedly say that I'm fairly harsh in giving ourselves myself a score. We're not where we want to be yet, but we're moving in that direction. So some of the things I think that we've gained from Sickens is a lot of them tie together. It's making sure the right person is doing the right thing. Okay, so you mentioned the producer doing service work. Okay. Everyone has a role to do and ever if you do, you stay in your lane. They stay in their lane. Producers responsibilities to be out producing and doing that and introducing relationships and that kind of stuff. We have an incredibly talented staff of individuals who sometimes don't get to do their job because Joe or Jill producer think that they have to do it. They don't. So know your role. Understand that keeping time in the green zone, identifying time where you are out, looking for opportunities that are going to allow you to continue to grow yourself and regardless of where you're at in your career now we look at and every agency is a little bit different but you're going to lose some business, they're going to go out of business, they're going to be sold. I don't care if you're the best agent in the world, you are going to lose accounts. So to just maintain where you're at, you have to be continuously looking for new opportunities. So, so that having that green time or you know, green zone time is very important. The high performance team meetings have been valuable in a couple ways. One, preparation so that we are ready to go out and I wish I could, I should go on and see if I can find it. I, I read one time and heard I, I've tried to repeat it a couple times, probably not very well but a gentleman was asked years and years ago about, you know, why is it you've been so successful when you go into battle? He was a military person and he said because I won't go into this battle until I'm ready and know that the odds are tipped to my favorite why would I go at any other time? So in a sales standpoint, why would I go out to write an account if I didn't know information that was going to help me out and make sure that I'm prepared? So I think those, those high performance team meetings have been very valuable. They also I think minimize interruptions between our staff so they can sit down and for a dedicated period of time, they can talk very clearly about what they're going to do and what I'm going to do, what you're going to do. And it's just, I think, moved us along in that fashion. The HPT meetings have been very good.
