How to Avoid the Multi-Million Dollar Mistake Most Agencies Make

Foreign welcome to the Agent Leader Podcast. My name is Brent Kelly. I am your host. Thanks so much for joining me on this very special episode of the Agent Leader podcast. Why is this a very special episode? Well, because this will be a rebroadcast of a live event that I did recently on how to avoid the multi million dollar mistake that most independent insurance agencies are are making. So I did this event live on LinkedIn. So if you're listening, you can listen to this event. If you're watching on video, you certainly can see the video as well. But this event was talking about what is that multi million dollar mistake. And by the way, there is a multi million dollar mistake. As I explain in this podcast episode I'll also talk about three specific impact areas of how you can avoid that multi million dollar mistake. Now at the end of this event and I'll announce it right now that we had a live announcement of a brand new product for the Sitkins Group. This is a big deal. This is something that we are super excited about. Not just for us, certainly we are excited, but for independent insurance agencies and to be able to take the best version possible, the idea, the mindset, the process into a 90 day, predictable, simplified and guaranteed 90 day roadmap for your agency. So if you want to check this out, please go check it out. It's on our website. It is live. Now go to sitkins.com fast track so sitkins.com fasttrack this is our BVP fast track product. You'll hear all about it. It is a good, simplified, predictable and guaranteed way to get your agency amazing results and give you that momentum in the course of 90 days. So take a look at that. Take a listen to this podcast. Again, glad that you're with me. I appreciate the positive feedback that we get on the podcast and certainly hope you get great value from today's episode. So without further ado, here's the multi million dollar mistake that most independent insurance agencies are making and how to avoid it. Enjoy. Now I'm going to start off by saying this. This title which you registered for for this session is a big claim. How to avoid the multi million not million but multi million dollar mistake that most independent insurance agencies are making. Now again, I know that's a bold claim, but I am going to share with you why this mistake is true. And I'm also going to give you some areas, three key areas where you and your agency can begin to move forward to avoid this mistake at whatever level you might be making it. Right? So this is a Big claim. But whether it's through doubt, confusion, uncertainty, we're going to help you today to work through this. Now, ultimately, our goal for you as an organization at the Sipkins Group is to help your agency gain freedom. Our mission is to educate, empower and equip independent insurance agencies. That's all we work with to help you and your agency get true freedom. Whether that's freedom of time, freedom of purpose, freedom in your relationships, or certainly freedom financially, which we're going to be talking about today. That is our goal and our mission for agencies. Now, I want to start off by giving a little bit of a backstory of this. This past year, the best practices study was released. Now it comes out every three years, so hopefully you and your agency have a copy of this, some great information. It's put out by the Big Eye and our great friends at Reagan Consulting. And in this study, they talk about different areas of impact, right? Best practices for agencies by agency revenue size. What was really interesting is that in this study, at the very beginning, there were some narratives. And one of the narratives was, what are some of the critical areas that independent insurance agencies are facing? And there was a question that was asked in the report that said this. What are the key elements to prospering as a privately held brokerage in today's market? Now, this question was asked specifically to 45 larger agency CEOs, right? Now, I think it is true for all agency sizes, but that's who this question was asked to. And it's interesting, when I looked at this question, I thought, well, the answers are probably going to be structure, right? It's probably going to be technology, right? Those are the kind of things that we'd want to see processes. But the top three answers from independent insurance agency leaders was this. And it was in this order. Number one was people, and we'll talk today that it really is all about the people. Number two was culture. I know culture is a bit of a buzzword, but it really was culture. Right? We're going to talk what does that mean as an agency? And number three, leadership. Right. Number three was leadership. So these are the top three answers based on that really important question in the study. Now, I want to take these in inverse order for a second because I want to explain our thoughts on it and how it can impact you as an agency. Let's start with leadership. One of my favorite leadership experts I had the pleasure of actually not only being in workshops with, but actually sharing the stage at one event is John Maxwell. And you probably know the name John Maxwell, he's written a lot of books, almost about 100 books on leadership and has workshops and resources. But he had a statement years and years ago that I think is true, truer now than it ever has been. And here was the statement, and he said this, that everything, not some things, and everything rises and falls on leadership. And I can tell you, in working with agencies across the country, it is absolutely true. It all starts with leadership, right? Clarity and leadership, vision, consistency and leadership, communication, commitment around leadership and accountability, right? It really is all about leadership. Number two is culture. Now, culture, the way that we define culture at the Sitkins group is the language and behaviors that are normal. In fact, again, here's the first note to write down. Culture is the language and behaviors that are normal in your agency. If your agency could talk, what would it say? Right? If your agency could move around, what is it doing? Right? That is the key part of culture. And again, I know culture can be a bit of a buzzword, but so often we get caught up in just the numbers. And we're going to talk about numbers and impact numbers and agency valuation numbers, which certainly is critical today. But all numbers are driven by the behaviors, and behaviors are surrounded by the culture of the agency. And then, of course, the top of the list is people. In fact, in the best practices study, this was interesting. The word people or developing people didn't come up once or twice or three times. It showed up eight times, eight times in the beginning of this report. It really is all about the people, right? That is the number one asset that you have as an agency leader. That's it. It's your people. So here's what I'm going to ask you, and I want you to think about this. You can write this down on your piece of paper. You can type it in the chat box. I can look at the chat here on my, my screen in front of me. Here's what I want to ask you. What is the number one job do you believe of an agency leader above all else? And just think about this for a second again, if you can chat, and I know we're on LinkedIn Live, some of you might be able to chat, some maybe not. But what do you believe is the number one job of an agency leader above all else? Right? What would it look like? What would you think? And again, write it down on your piece of paper or certainly at least have it up here again. Your answer. There isn't really a wrong answer because I think it's your answer and it's important. But here's what I believe. The number one job of an agency leader is this, to grow and develop your people. That is the number one job above ours. How well as a leader and a leadership team are we doing to grow and develop our people? Now you may be thinking, well, gosh, Brett, you know, we already do training, we already do development. We, we do want to grow our people. And by the way, I don't know you or your agency personally, right? Who's watching this? But I will tell you this in the best practices study in the report, it was interesting of the numbers. In fact, it was maybe a bit disappointing that you look at training and development as a whole for agencies that the number here and the best practice report showed that agencies, and these were agencies that were 1.25 million and larger, 25 million up. So it was a lot of, a lot of agencies. The actual number was that agencies invested 0.24%, 0.24%, less than one quarter of, of 1% on training and development of the most important asset they have in their agency, which is their people. In fact, a lot of this is licensing and continued education. Now here's the even sadder part, I guess to my point of view is that 0.52, over half or over double of that was spent on miscellaneous, right? I'm sure there's some important miscellaneous things, but more important than our people? No. And again, I don't know what your agency is investing, but just this stat around this many agency was really eye opening. So it got us to thinking as a group and trying to help agencies like yours is why don't agencies invest? Why don't they spend more time, energy and effort on developing their people? Well, I think there could be a number of answers, but here's two things that really jump out. Number one is it's not your primary focus, right? You're out there trying to retain and obtain ideal clients and you're selling insurance and benefits and having risk conversations, carrier meetings and all the craziness in the market, right? So it's not your primary focus. Number two is that maybe in the past, or maybe internal or externally, it's just been ineffective. Maybe you haven't got the traction that you wanted for some of the train development. You thought, you know what isn't worth it. Anyway, we're going to talk about some of those things today. Here's one of the things that may sound strange coming from a coach and a consultant that works only with independent insurance agencies is that most training. Let me stop this for A second most traditional training fails. It does. Most traditional training isn't that great. Here is the studies that bear this out. After 90 days, 84% of the learning in traditional training is lost. Right? In traditional training, the stuff that doesn't really work, it's lost. So why does it fail? Let's go a step deeper. Why does training development fail too often in agencies? Because obviously we're passionate about this. We want agencies to grow and develop. Well, number one, training is too often event based. It's one event, right? Maybe it's a two day event, right? Maybe it's a one hour session. Oh, we did a, we did one thing, we got trained, right? Events don't work, but processes and plans do. Secondly, too often training is done in isolation. And this is to me what I would call is the lone soldier approach. We've got one producer, one sales leader, maybe one department, maybe one half a department that goes and gets some training, but it's never integrated with the rest of the team. So we've got some people that are training and moving forward and some maybe that aren't and they aren't communicating very well. And the final thing is this training is too often information based versus transformational. It's information versus transformation. And listen, information is important. I'm going to be sharing information with you today. But until we turn that in from head knowledge to heart knowledge and hand knowledge and foot knowledge, right? Our behaviors that are truly transformational, it's not going to work. We've got to get some momentum and some confidence to get the transformation we're seeking. So here's the disconnect of all of this. Training is important, right? It's necessary, but it too often fails. So what I'm going to share with you today is this the only way. And I truly believe this because we see this all the time with the most, the best growth agencies, right? The agencies that are having the best success. The only way for you as an agency, an agency leadership team to truly grow and develop and scale at the level you want. And as we're going to talk today about becoming your best version possible, you've got to have an integrated training and development plan that works, right? The best way to do this, and we're going to talk about this, and I'm going to show this with you at the end of the session, is to have a 90 day fast track to get people moving together quickly with consistency in the right direction. So that's the disconnect. And this is where we're going to go Today. Now, I do want to give you some backstory and background on the impact the agencies that we've been able to have, some training, development, what they've been able to achieve. We conducted a value impact study with some of the agency coaching clients that we have from 2019 to 2022. So over the course of three years to see their growth and development again. These are agencies that were focused on production development, service development and leadership development. Right. To integrate this. And this is an average of our agency size. You've got some smaller agencies and some larger agencies, but the average agency size was $10.3 million in revenue in 2019. That jumped all the way to 13.7 million in 2022 with a 33% growth rate. And there were some things that were going on right in those years, for sure. What about profitability? Because it's not just what you make in revenue, it's what you keep our agencies through. This jump from 16.3% in profit all the way to 22.1%, which was a 36% growth in profitability. Now, if you can merge growth and profitability, what does that do? Well, that rapidly increases the value of your agency. Now, whether you want to perpetuate your agency soon, later, internally, externally, at some point you're going to leave your agency. We all do, right? At some point you're going to leave your agency. So outside of people, why is that important to help people? Because agency valuation was mentioned many times in the Best Practice Report as a primary indicator of what agency leaders want. Makes common sense. Now, here's what I want to share with you. Our value impact study showed that our agencies went from 16.8 million in valuation to 30.3 million evaluation. And by the way, this is based on a 10x multiple. Now, if you had any conversations, certainly externally, with people looking to buy agencies over the past few years, we know that 10x as a multiple is pretty low, right? 10x of your profit. Now, if you think about that, it's usually 12, 13, 14, 15. But I want to share 10x just to give a basic number that we can all understand. But based on 10x, we saw an 80.4% growth rate in agency profitability in three years. Right. Why? We've got agencies that are integrated producers, service team leadership on one path to success. Now, I mentioned this, I'll say it again. This is so important when I say the multi million dollar mistake. Why is this a multi million dollar mistake? Well, because if we don't do this at the right level, we are missing out on millions of dollars because every 100k in profit is 1 million plus in agency value. Now again, you may say, well, I don't want to sell my agency. Agency value still matters, right? So this idea of being able to get greater profit allows us to have our agency have greater value. Now listen, there's three areas I said I'm going to share with you today that you as an agency leader can have impact on and move your agency forward. So here's the three things I'm going to share with you today. Number one, how to install a training development program for your agency that actually works. Right. So I'm going to share with you a model that actually works. And it works. It's predictable, it's simple and it's guaranteed when you put it in your agency. So we're going to talk about that today. Number two, how do you get buy in from your team to get them excited? So I'm going to talk about this challenge. This objection that agencies get is, well, I may want it, but how do I get my team to want it? We'll talk about that. And number three is how to get the roi, how to get the greatest agency return on your investment of time and training. All right, so again, if you don't have your pen and paper, please get ready. We're going to move pretty quickly here and I'm going to share some important information with you. All right, let's get to impact area number one, how to install a training and development program that actually works. Now I do want to give some backstory here because it's important to where we're going in the model. About five years ago, we were getting ready to lead an agency CEO event. This was in Atlanta, Georgia the night before. We're doing some preparation. And here is Roger Sitkins. Many of you know Roger Sitkins and certainly probably know the name as it's on our name of our company, the Sitkins Group. But I asked Roger, I thought was a very innocent question, but I was thinking about how to best help agency leaders. And I said, I said, Roger, if an agency leader were to ask you what the best version possible of their agency would look like, what would you tell them? And he sat there for a second and was thinking about it and all of a sudden started to rattle off a number of strategies and processes and key behaviors that he's worked with over 40 years to get agencies the best results possible. You can see here. We actually began to discuss this right away with agency leaders. What does the best version possible look like now, that was great. However, it wasn't systemized as much as we wanted. So recently we co authored. Roger, myself co authored this book, right? And here's the thing. The question that I asked Roger was this, you know, what's the best version of an agency look like? And that night, right before this event that we had, Roger woke up the next morning, we got together for breakfast, and I could tell something had changed. I said, roger, what's going on? He said, well, that question you asked last night kept me up most of the night because I was thinking not only about agency's best version possible, but my best version possible. And he said he found a lyric from a Canadian songwriter named Chris Assad. And this is at 3 o' clock in the morning. And the lyrics said this. Close your eyes and imagine your best version possible. That's who you really are. Let go of anything that's holding you back, right? And so this became a movement and a momentum. And I share with you the book, but it also became a book. Now we've got, I mean, so many agency professionals that are diving into this book and loving this book. And we're proud of what this accomplishes because it begins to give a roadmap for an agency. But we know, and we knew we could do even more, right? So we began to integrate some of our training that was typically in person into online training. Now, by the way, COVID 19, you may remember that that was a part of this as well. And we were challenged, right? We were challenged very much with the idea of, hey, how do we integrate virtual online training in the world of distraction, right? What is that going to look like? Well, we began to work on this every single week and month to integrate this training. Here's some screenshots of this and what we found was that a virtual online training, although there are some limitations as far as you aren't personally in the room, has a ton of advantages. Obvious ones like, well, it's easy to attend, it's easy to get to, doesn't cost any more money for time and travel. But the coolest part of virtual training was some of the responses we began to get and have gotten over the years. These are some of the things, and I'll throw these on the screen for the first time, our entire team, right? Because we're able to integrate producers and service team professionals and sales leaders into one integrated approach versus having these sporadic trainings. Wow. For the first time, our team is working together to apply these principles and strategies. It's amazing how Our services, sales are aligned, it's easy to attend and apply. My favorite ones right here. And a person said to me, I thought virtual was going to be sucky, all right, but actually it was awesome, right? We try to make them very interactive and we do. And of course we love these, these comments. But Sitkin's group has been life changing to me personally and their entire agency feeds off the, the culture. Remember that word culture that you guys create. So here's my question for you. This isn't about us, it's about you. So here's my question to you. What's your model? What is your business model when it comes to growth, development and training of your most important asset, your people? In fact, here's something else I'm going to ask you to write down and this is a very powerful statement. Your current business model is perfectly designed to get to the results you're currently getting. Your current business model is perfectly designed to get you the results you're currently getting. Now, whether you love your results or loathe the results, it's based on your business model. And what we found through trial and error of what works and what doesn't work is there's not a hundred things that your agency needs to do or focus on. By the way, I could ask you the chat box, I know there's a bit of delay from mine to you, but I'm asking the chat box yes or no. Do you as an agency leader want or need more things to do? Right, like please, I just got nothing to do today, can you give me more stuff? Of course not. Right. None of you want more things to do. What you need to do is the right things with greater focus, intensity and effort. So here's a model I'm going to share with you today and I'm going to walk through all four of these. So don't worry about this too much. But the four things we have here is based on the best version possible model. So it starts with alignment, getting everyone on the same page. And then it focuses on the fact that we've got to get our producers, of course, sales and service working together in the green zone, we got to get them in the game. Then we've got to retain and replicate and understand who our best clients are, how we got them, how we find more of them, and then put that all together into a two in a true obtain model of identifying who we want, why we want them in our target account, strategy plan for getting them. It's four areas. So let me go through these four and again, you can take. Take some notes and write these down. Certainly the first area again is alignment. Now, I don't know if you've ever been in a car that's been out of alignment. Maybe you've seen another car that's out of alignment. But I'll tell you, I have been in a car out of alignment. And here's what it does. It shakes, it vibrates, it sometimes veers off to one direction. Here's what I do know. The longer you wait to correct it or fix it, the worse the problem gets and the more expensive it's going to cost. So the first area that is important in any model for learning and development and growth is we got to have alignment. That we have our entire team with the same goal. Understanding, appreciation, respect and trust on the different roles. Do we have clarity on the vision, the mission, and the key areas that we need to focus on as an agency, or is everybody just doing a bunch of stuff? So my question to you right now, when it comes to alignment, and I know this is subjective, you don't need to share this, but when it comes to alignment, people really understanding the agency's way of doing business, how would you rate your agency today in alignment? 1 through 10? 10 is you're fully aligned. You got it all put together. Everyone understands the role of responsibilities and the mission, the vision we're going to. And one is, yeah, we should probably talk about that sometime, right? So how would you rate your agency? And here's what I want you to do. I mentioned earlier the quote, remember the quote, that Close your eyes and imagine your best version possible. I want you to imagine your best version possible in these key areas. So let's start with alignment. Imagine that your agency did fully understand the same goal that you have together, appreciating, respecting, and trusting those different roles. ART is an acronym, and this comes back to what I just mentioned, Art, appreciation, respect and trust. If we don't have those things internally as an agency, the external things become really, really difficult. And lastly is imagine if your agency had one plan, one common language and culture that really got your agency moving forward. It really starts with alignment. You wouldn't build a house without the foundation. You wouldn't have a plan, a processor model without alignment. All right, number two of the model, Green Zone. Of all the things that we have taught and talked about at the Siskins Group over all the years, this one's probably the stickiest. Why? It's really simple. Number two, it's really effective. What do we mean by this? Well, let me give you a very simple analogy. I was a very average athlete, I guess, back in my day, right? But I love sports and watch sports and here's what I know, that you can't score points in a game if you're not on the court or on the field. Like you can't score, you're not in the game. The same is true with producers in particular. They're trying to score points, AKA grow their business, write more business. And they're not in the game, they're not in the selling zone. So the key part is how much, how often, how frequently are our producers in the green zone? By the way, green zone means pay zone. It means results zone. We're doing the stuff. What is the definition of a producer? You may want to write this one down. The definition of a producer is really simple. One who produces, right? So if they're on the bench or in the office, we're not doing selling stuff. What are they doing? Well, they might be doing too much of this, the red zone stuff, which is a service trap or hiding behind service, other distractions that aren't fully getting results. So I want you to imagine for a second green zone in your agency. Now, maybe you're doing a pretty good job of this, maybe you're struggling, but imagine getting your team aligned and then in the green zone where you're increasing the revenue per employees. We don't have profitable producers subsidizing the unprofitable producers. We got our team in the game. Producers are in this green zone 80% of the time throughout the week. 80% of their time is spent in four key areas. And I will give you the four money making activities in the green zone. Number one is sales, right? Pretty important. Number two, relationship management, proactive relationship management. Number three, continuations, a fancy name for proactive renewals or being intentional. And number four is pipeline development. Those are the four areas. Imagine if your producers are in that 80% of the time. And your producers, because they're focused on the right stuff and in the game are relentlessly prepared for every opportunity and appointment. That's what the green zone is all about. That's the focus of green zone in a great agency or a best version possible agency model. Our area number three of the model, again, these are simple. But how well do we implement them is retain and replicate. This comes back to the power of, of the 8020 rule. If I ask you all, do you know the 8020 rule? Have you heard of parentheses principle? My guess is 90% of you plus are going to go, yeah, yeah, Brent, I know the 80 20, it's been around forever. Yes, it has. My second question is, how well, deliberately and effectively do you implement the power of 8020 in your agency? Because here's the deal. We have run thousands, I mean thousands of studies on agencies. Book of Business Departments, Book of Business Producers, Book of Business. And I will tell you this, 99% of the time, 20% of your clients, the top 20 cent, 20, 20% produces 80% of your agency's revenue. There is a predictable imbalance. And when we understand that and apply that, it is an absolute game changer. There are agencies who have heard about 8020 for years and years and years and years and they finally come in and go, gosh, now that I really see this and we apply this to, this has changed our agency completely. It's allowed more time and freedom and deeper relationships with the people we really want to work with. It's so powerful. Now imagine this for a second. When it comes to retain and replicate that you have a true continuation strategy in your agency. Because ultimately it's not about renewing accounts. Every agency does that. It's about continuing the relationship. Right. It's about going deeper in that. What if you had an ultimate growth strategy in your agency? What is the ultimate growth strategy? It's pretty simple. That you rounded out with focused, retained with focus, and replicated your A and B clients or your top 20% of your clients, that produces 80% of your revenue. It's so powerful. And what if because you did such a good job of being focused that 80% of your clients would give you referral? And by the way, agencies have this happen. They get focused, they understand the power of it, of the referral based marketing. And guess what? Yeah, it's been around for a long time. It's the most effective, most powerful thing you can possibly do in your agency. However, most agencies, forget about it. Why don't we get referrals? We don't ask, why don't we ask? But we haven't earned them. Why aren't you earning them? We did it. And down we go. Right? Down we go. All right, let's get to number four. Fourth area of the model is an obtain strategy, which is a little bit different. Right? This isn't just a blast to everybody. This is a specific plan to identify, attract and differentiate yourself in the marketplace. Just be able to move away from a generic positioning, great service, best people, got lots of markets. We've got really competitive pricing. Right. Versus saying this is our tangible offer. Of differentiation. We know you and what you want, we understand your frustrations and we have a plan or process to help move your business or your life forward to truly differentiate yourself in the marketplace. So imagine obtaining where you've got a full pipeline of not suspects or prospects, but of ideal clients. Imagine because you're walking clients through a process, not a not a look, copy, quote and pray process. You've got a selling system where with 80% of close ratio, imagine that your producers are specialized, they really understand who they're working with, the right questions to ask and the right partners to work with. Right. It truly is a game changer. Now I just share with you the Model 4 areas. Right alignment, green zone, retain and replicate and obtain. Here's my question for you. Can you do this model yourself? You can, you could. We have agencies that try this and again, I'm all for you go out and do something to get better. But here's the issue that we run into and we see with agencies that try this on their own, they lose clarity on why they're doing it. They lose consistency on doing it repeatedly. And they sometimes forget or get away from the commitment that they have to themselves and their agency team. I want to share with you an example of an agency that we work with. And by the way, before I even get to this, I just want to ask you a question. Do you, in your agency right now, are there other places, third parties that you use to help facilitate and do other things in your agency like it? Right. Maybe some tax returns, legal? Yeah. The answer is, of course you do. Why do we use third party sources to do that? Well, because they're really good at what they do. They're effective and allows you to do what you do at the highest level. Right. So keep that in mind because I think sometimes it gets missed. I said I was going to share an example of an agency. This is a large agency in Pennsylvania. This is the leadership team. This is at one of our events and we got done and we put our hands in the middle and agreed on some things that we were going to do. But this is an agency that's consistently grown leaps and bounds, year after year after year. And part of the reason, or a big part of the reason is because the people, the culture and the leadership. In fact, I want to share something with you. I thought this was really cool. This agency actually in every one of their offices put up this mirror. I know this is kind of hard to see and there's a reflection. It's gonna look kind of goofy but at the very top you may see there, it says, is this your best version possible? Right. Love that. Of course. And the bottom, I know it's kind of hard to see, but it says this, producers, if it's Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday between 9am and 3pm, you should not be reading this mirror. Why? Well, because the producers are in the green zone. Right? Producers are in the green zone. So this shows the power of culture when everyone begins to understand a model and follow it. All right, let's get to impact area number two. Impact area number two. I talked today and I was going to share this. How to get buy in from your team and get them excited about the process. You know, one of the things that I know could be frustrating for leaders and this is frustrating for anybody in different organizations that really wants something, is that just because you want something really bad for your agency or people on your team doesn't mean they want it the same way you do. Right? It just doesn't mean that they may not want at the same level you do. And I can tell you as a father of five kids, my amazing wife Tracy here, over 20 years we've been together and have five amazing kids together. I can tell you as a dad of five, there are certain things that I want for my kids and my family that they don't want. But here's what I want to share with today. As a leader, one of your goals and roles is to see more and before others to paint a picture that people are excited about, to give them a plan and a process that they can go achieve things. Because here's the deal. If you don't get buy in, everything you did is just a good idea. In fact, I will ask you to write this down, please, because this is important and maybe you've dealt with this before. Is your best idea, not your worst idea, your good idea, your best. Your best idea without buy in is a failed idea. This is certainly true in the insurance world, right? You might have a great idea for a client or a prospect you want to work with, but if they don't buy in, it don't work. Same is true with your team, your producers, your account managers, your sales leaders, years and years ago. And I'm going to share a picture here of my family. This is my family, my brothers and my sister, my mom and dad. And by the way, this handsome little double right here, I mean, look at that brown and orange shirt there. That's pretty quality, isn't it? That's me with the bowl cut. But years and years Ago, as a kid, my mom had some. I said something that I didn't really think about much until I got older. Maybe you've had that with one of your parents or someone that you looked up to that, oh, now I get it. And here's what she said. Those convinced Brent against their will are of the same opinion still. Right? Those convinced against their will. I'm going to tell you what to do no matter what, are of the same opinion still. They may listen for a while, but deep down in their core, they're going to go, I'm going to go do what I want to do anyway. All right. Maybe you felt that as a leader. Well, here's why. Every single one of us listens to the same radio station. You're listening to wiifm. What does that stand for? What's in it for me? Right. As human beings, for better, for worse, we think about ourselves quite a bit. Right? So everyone's tuning into, well, what's in it for me? I know you as an agency leader and you an agency wants to grow, but what about me? What's in it for me? So here's a key question to think about and consider. Do your producers, do your service team members, do your sales leaders, do they have to get developed and grow and train or do they get to. Right, do you have to, you have to go do this versus, hey, listen, you get to go grow and develop and we've got a planner process to help you do. And by the way, I believe this Roger here is raising his hand. I believe that any quality individual desires growth and without it, they get very frustrated. Maybe it comes out, maybe it doesn't, but they get frustrated. People aren't raising their hand saying, listen, I want to do more and be more. Paint a picture. Show me how that growth to me equals happiness. Happiness equals improved actions. Improved actions equal the results that we want. Results lead to the options. We have more options in life. So what I want to do for a few minutes here is I want to share with you. Have you ever thought about what people on your team want? Now, by the way, I understand that this can be certainly subjective and it varies by agency and individual. But I think overall there's some key tendencies that we see in working with thousands of professionals of what they really want to help them get buy in. Right. What do producers want? Let's start with producers. Well, producers want to reach their goals. Now, part of this is it's their why have you asked your producers, have you asked your team members going, what is that? You really want to. What do you really want and are the things that I can help you do to get you there now doesn't mean it's going to be perfect. But to ask the question says what I care, right? So producers want to reach their goals. Producers want to grow their book, obviously. But it's not just about the numbers to grow their book. Have you ever had a conversation where someone didn't reach their numbers? You go, well, you got to hit your numbers next year. What are the behaviors behind the numbers that we can help their skill set to reach that next step? And producers want teamwork and collaboration. Yes, producers are very independent. In fact, here's now analogy I love to use. Leading producers isn't easy. Why? It's kind of like nailing jello to a tree. They squiggle and wobble a lot, Right? But when you really get to the heart of producers, they want to have teamwork and collaboration. Our Highest level producers, million dollar 2 million dollar 3 producers, guess what? They don't do it on their own. They build a team around them. That's what producers really want. What about service pros, the service professionals in your agency? Well, three things I think jump out. Number one is they want to be appreciated. They want to be appreciated. This doesn't have to be some big dog and pony show and it's big party. It's I appreciate what you do and what it means for the agency. I heard a phrase a while back, I think it's absolutely true. What you appreciate, appreciates. What you appreciate will appreciate. Just like money, Right? And by the way, too often this isn't true in every agency. But in many agencies, it just happens, unfortunately, is that the service team is kind of treated like the redheaded stepchild. It's kind of off in the corner. They just do their thing and there's not enough appreciation. Right. Great account managers, they really want to be leveled up. They don't want to be left out, they want to be leveled up. Secondly is trust. Right? They want to have trust in their team, trust in their leadership, that we're on a path of success. Jeffrey Gittamer said it so well as an author and speaker. He said no trust, no nothing. We've got to do what we said we were going to do as a team. Right. Without trust, we don't have much. And they want respect. Their role in an agency is really hard. Right. You probably know that, but it's really challenging. They want respect to say, listen, I have a different role than producers and leaders. We get that. But Please respect what that role involves. Right. I think that's a big part of what service leaders want or service pros want. What about sales leaders? What do sales leaders want? Well, I'll keep this pretty short and sweet, but I think they really want the best. The best sales leaders. They want to be educated more. They want more knowledge and things they can utilize in their agency. They also want to be equipped to be given the tools and resources to do their job at a higher level. Because I'll tell you what, the sales leadership position, whether it's a principal who leads the sales team, whether it's a player coach, whether it's a standalone service or sales leader, it is a really hard position. And the last thing this is where we really want to help agencies, is empowerment. I've got a picture here. You can see. This is my. My daughter Michaela. She's my oldest daughter. This was back, gosh, probably five, six years ago now. We were out in the driveway shooting hoops, right? Dad and daughter shooting hoops. She was getting ready for high school basketball, wanted a chance to play more on the high school team. And we'd be out in the driveway shooting hoops. And I would always say things, you know, I played basketball pretty successfully growing up. And I would say, hey, Mikhail, you know, keep your arm here and get your feet square and all those kind of things. And she is a typical teenage daughter. If you have a teenage daughter or son, you probably know this. She would say things like, I know, dad. I know, Dad. I know, Dad. I know, dad. You feel like a broken record. I'll never forget. We're out in the driveway one time, my neighbor walks by walking his dog, and he happens to be a high school basketball coach. And he started talking to her and said almost exactly what I said to her. And she went from I know, dad, to, oh, you mean like this and like this. I see. And I'm thinking to myself, are you kidding me? But here's the. Here's the moral of the story. It's about empowerment. And part of empowerment is third party, third party validation, right? To have someone else reinforce the things that you're trying to accomplish in your agency. Third party validation is critically important. And to give you an agency example of this, this is one of our agency, longtime coaching clients, great agency in North Carolina. We started working with them. We started specifically with the production team. Now, of course, we need to get the producers to buy in. And a big part of getting buy in from the producers is to help the producers design their future. What do you really want. Why do you want it? And what would it mean? Now the next part is how do we get the account managers and the sales leaders to all integrate together? When we first started doing production training, it was great, but there was a problem. There wasn't buy in from the service team. There was a bunch of producers. The producers got the training. The producers are going to make more money. The producers are going to do this. And suddenly we integrated the account managers in a holistic process. All of a sudden, everything shifted. The past three years, they broke records every single year. And by the way, this is a $10 million plus agency. This is a large agency. And I'll tell you what, if you ask him what's been. The difference is that our people are bought into what we're doing. They're excited of their growth and their development, their opportunities in front of them. It's a critical area. All right, let's get to area number three. We've talked about the model, we've talked about buying. Let's get to roi. At the end of the day, this is what many agency leaders want. How do I get the greatest return on my investment? And how do I get the greatest return on my agency? Which is, by the way, your agency is probably the largest, most important thing that many agency leaders own. Right? So there are some really interesting studies that came out about ROI when it comes to training and development of your most important asset, your people. Accenture came out with a study recently. It said this. They showed that through a number of organizations that every $1 invested got a 4.53 return, otherwise known as a 353% ROI. Really powerful financial return. For every $1, I get $4.53 back. What's really interesting, outside of the financial impact, there's been some other impacts of really having a growth and development program for your team. CFO.com this is a very recent study, said training and development made a major impact on employee retention and recruiting. Now, by the way, I'll just ask you here and you can think about this and write this down while we're just putting your head, is finding and keeping your best people more challenging or less challenging than it was five, 10 years ago? It's probably more challenging. A Gallup poll said this. This is really interesting. 59% of millennials, which obviously is the largest part of the workforce today, say that training and development is extremely important when they're making a decision of who to work with. In fact, the PwC report, Price Water, price Pricewater, Cooper House Cooper. I'll get it out. Learning development was Millennials first choice over any other benefit was what type of learning and growth and development program do I have? 35% said it made the employer more attractive. So this is something I ask any agency. I'll ask you right now. If someone who is looking to be part of your team came to you and said, could you share with me the growth, learning, development path that I will have at your agency, what would you say? What could you say? Right? Because here's the deal. Training and development is a sizable ROI financially. It just is. The numbers continue to show that that is one of the, if not the best investment you can make. But also as I mentioned, it gives recruiting and retention, it gives your agency a huge competitive advantage. One of my favorite graphics or cartoons, whatever you want to call it, shows the CFO and the CEO of some company sitting there at the table and the CFO is thinking about all the dollars, right? What are we going to spend? Says this, what if we invest in our people and they leave and the CEO calmly replies, what if we don't and they stay, right? What is that going to look like? So just keep that in mind. I think it's such a powerful graphic. Now maybe you're thinking, well, we want to do some training, development. Brent, we have done some training, development or agency. But you know what, perpetuation is looming. At some point we're going to leave the business. Now maybe you're going to leave your business in a year, three years, five years or way down the road, or maybe you don't really know. But as I said earlier, at some point you are going to leave your business, whether it's internal or external. So what about perpetuation? Well, I'm going to go back to what I shared earlier because whether you're going to perpetuate in one year, three years, five years, 10 years, it comes back to the basics of this multi million dollar mistake. Every $100,000 in agency profit. Now if you want to get more specific, EBITDA, but every $100,000 in agency profit is a million dollars plus in agency value. And by the way, what does it take to generate a hundred thousand dollars in agency profit? Well done. The right way, with a model, with a plan, right? Getting buy in from your team. It's very possible and very doable. There's a lot of examples that I've shared and I'll continue to share that. Do that. So just think about this again. Whether you're going to perpetuate A year from now or 10 years from now, the best time to make an investment in your people is before it's too late. The old proverb, this has been around forever. Said, when is the best time to plant an oak tree? Not 20 years ago. When's the next best time? Today. Right? Today. Invest in your people. All right, one more thing I want to share because there can be some hidden metrics sometimes we see in the data. This is a organic growth chart put out by Reagan's Growth and Profitability Survey. Again, Reagan does a great job. As I mentioned, they're part of the best practices to put that out, the best practices report. And this goes all the way to quarter four of 2022. Obviously, this has continued. If you follow this, this number has stayed pretty consistent, pretty high over the first couple quarters of 2023. But if you look back in the history of organic growth for independent insurance agencies, it's hovered 4, 5, 6%. It jumped 8.8 and then 10.2, the fourth quarter of 2022, and you go, wow, our agency's doing really well. And of course, you add in market conditions, like, we're doing really well. And I hope you are right. We want agencies to be successful, but you gotta be careful because numbers can be misleading. So as Reagan showed on this report, this is really interesting, there's this thing out there called inflation. Maybe you felt it. And going to the grocery store, buying anything in the marketplace, when you take out inflation, this orange part, the actual, the real agency, organic growth rate is 3.7%. Right. There is a big disconnect between what actually we're seeing and taking out inflation where we're at. So here's why I want to share this again. Whether your agency is doing really well, it's doing okay. You know, it could be better. Maybe you're struggling, maybe you're plateaued. Is that we don't want to mislead ourselves. Warren Buffett has done pretty well in his career, has a great saying. I love this. Only when the tide goes out do you know, you discover who's been swimming naked right when the tide goes out, who's been doing the right things and who's been covered up by market and inflation, those kind of things. And I'm going to give another quote from Warren because I think this is an important one and maybe the most important quote of the day. Hopefully you believe in this. As you can tell, I'm passionate as a team. We believe in it. The best investment that you can make of any kind is the One that you make to yourself, the one you make to your agency team, right? I mean, ask Warren Buffett, you've made a lot of great investments. He said, yeah, I have. But the best one is investing into me. Remember, people desire growth, they want change, they want improvement. And if we can help people grow and develop, our agency grows and develop. It's a beautiful thing, right? It's a beautiful thing. So I want to take a moment. I mentioned earlier that we're going to talk about the best way to do this and I want to share this, but before I get to that, I want to make sure that I share this. So often when it comes to agencies doing anything, doing something, remember I said earlier, you don't need more things to do, you need to do the right things with greater focus and effort. We were having a conversation at a leadership meeting for the Sitkins Group and we were talking about what can we do with our knowledge and expertise to help agencies truly get on the fast track to success, to truly get momentum, to truly get consistency at a quick place. It's simplified, it's predictable. And as I'll talk today about guaranteed going to guarantee it. And we said, you know what, if we can get agencies instead of doing this, oh, there's so many things and we can get agencies to go, great, we can finally do this at the level we need to, right? We've got a plan, we've got a process, we have people and organizations to help us do this, then we're on the right track. Because at the end of the day, the only way that we as an organization succeed is when agencies succeed. That's it, right? We've got to help agencies win and succeed. And so we've developed something that's brand new. This is the first time this has ever been announced or released. And we are super excited about this and I'll explain to you why in more details of it. But it's the best version possible. I mentioned the mindset, the movement, the book. We wanted to take the model, we want to take everything about best version possible and put it into a complete system over a period of time. A 90 day system that gives you a quantifiable results that will move your agency forward to be a catalyst and a foundations for your agency's ultimate growth. And so in the 90 day system there are three specific areas, three specific programs that are all integrated. And that's a really important word, they're integrated, right? They go together. It starts with producer fit. Again, these are all together. But let me talk Through Producer Fit. This is probably the most popular program that we've run individually at the Citigens Group for a long period of time. And there's a reason why it works for producers. But now we're going to put it on steroids because we're going to integrate it with the other programs. Now, Producer Fit follows the four step model that I mentioned. Alignment, Green zone, Retain and replicate and obtain. So let me share what it looks like. Because the 90 day system includes eight live interactive sessions with ongoing roundtable discussions based around those four areas over eight live events. The first session is based around designing your future as a producer to get them to understand what's really possible for them. And what's exciting about this first session is they move from I don't know if I need to do this to oh my gosh, there's so much more that I could accomplish. It's very exciting whether it's a newer producer, a plateau producer, or even a successful producer, to see what's possible. Then we get into the idea, foundational strategies that we can tie in with the entire team. We move into the green zone. How to get producers in the green zone 80% of the time. And by the way, when producers get into the green zone 80% of the time, their production on average increases 25% or more just by getting in the game. So we want to get them in the game and get them prepared. We then move into preparation and practice. What are the things they need to prepare and practice that at the highest level. Then we move into retain and replicate. Right. There's two sessions around that retention. We talked about the five exit barriers to keep clients for life. We also reviewed the 80:20 rule again to get them to replicate in session six, a reverse referral process, identifying future ideal clients based on the type of client they want. In the final phase of obtain, we dive very deep into a specific selling strategy and process and finally wrap it up with installing consistent habits and behaviors they can take with them for the rest of their life. Right. So it's putting it all together now we integrate this with coach the coach at the same time, every other session the producers are running, we have a coach, the coach program, which is for our sales leaders. What are the producers learning? How can they have conversations with the producers to take them further, to help coach them and hold them accountable, Things that they truly want and the account manager fit. Remember, we don't want to leave the account managers out. In fact, we want to appreciate respect and get them more trust that they deserve and to do that every other session of the producer. So four live virtual events for the account managers. We're going to follow the same model and integrate everything that we learned together in one holistic approach for your agency. So this is the 90 day system. We also have a live integrated sales and service meeting after those eight live sessions and I'll tell more about what's included. But it is a powerful integrated approach. So what does it look like? Some things just to. Again, we're going to give you a link to the landing page so you can see more about this. But what are some things that really jump out? Well, simplified onboarding. We want to make this simple, predictable and guaranteed for your agency. We're going to make it easy to get your team in, get registered, get started and get excited about this. It's one flat fee, no gotchas, no extras. As many people on your agency, your producers, your account managers and your sales leaders that want to attend, they're all included with one fat of one flat fee. It's 100 virtual. I mentioned the advantage of virtual, that they don't need to pay for their travel. There's no hotels, it's designated a certain period of time and of course time to look at the resources that they can do on at their convenience from the comfort of their office or certainly their home. We have a abundance of on demand resources, videos, resources, tools. Why reinforcement supplement. To make sure that through this 90 days they are truly on the fast tack, fast track for success. And finally, it's for your entire agency team, as I mentioned. Right, it's for everybody. So I know you're thinking, okay, you've been talking about this stuff, you're excited about it, what's the investment? We made this about as simple, as straightforward as we possibly can. Again, this is for every member of your agency that's a producer, account manager and service leader. I mean sales leader. And it's based by tiered approaches. So obviously the more revenue agency has, the more people we're going to need to onboard. But it's based on these seven different categories. So very simply see where your agency is in revenue and tie the fee over there. That's the fee for everybody that we just talked about in your agency. One price, all the resources, all the tools. Now I mentioned earlier about the investment that agencies make in learning and development. I told you that most agencies are only investing 0.24% of their revenue back into learning and development. We've made this pricing to where it was a no brainer for the Agencies that really want to grow and develop. If you look at a 4 million dollar agency in this category, the investment is 0.13, 5.15% of your entire agency revenue. If you're an $8 million agency, it gets even better. It's 0.09% of your agency revenue. $13 million agency in this category, it's.07% of your agency revenue. And if you're an $18 million agency, it's 0.06. The point of it is the cost should not be any factor for an agency. We have a mission. A mission to help agencies unlock their true potential and become the best version possible to truly gain freedom. We have a countless number of success stories and I'll share some of these. We want you to be one of the success stories. We don't want you to wait and look back and say why didn't we do this? So how to get started? Well, the next fast track starts on October 3rd. So it's coming up pretty quick. October 3rd, right? In fact, it's limited. And why I say it's limited. This is the very first time we're announcing this. We're going to have more sessions to announce this. We're already in talks with insurance carriers and other key influencers to get agencies in. So guess what? When we get to 50 agencies, we're done, right? When we get to 50 agencies by October 3rd, we're done. Don't wait. I know we've got some care partners, influencers that have already talked about a number of agencies all kind of joining at one time. So we don't know how quick it's going to go. We want to help you. We also got to make sure our team has enough resources to make sure we onboard at the highest level. And here's the last thing I'll say on this. It is 100% guaranteed. And we mean, I know you've heard this before, but I mean this like we mean this as an agency, as an organization. If your team goes through these programs, this 90 day fast track and you go, you know what? That is not what I thought. That's not what we wanted. I didn't feel good about that. I didn't like it. We will refund every penny of your money immediately. By the way. We believe that will not happen. You know why? Because we've done this for a long time. Success with agencies like yours. Now I mentioned that we've got a lot of testimonials of agencies that have gone through this. I'm not going to Read these. These will be on the landing page as I'll introduce in a second. But you'll see it's not important what I say, it's important what agency leaders say, what they're getting from the programs, what they're getting. An integrated holistic approach for their team. We again we want you to be part of this where you have the greatest return on investment that you've ever had. So let me give one final summary here and also I'll put a link here. Dana, our awesome assistant here with me, she put up the QR code as well. So a few ways that you can learn more about this. Get your agency registered right away. You don't want to miss out is you certainly can go to this link here sitkins.com fast track that link was is live for the first time ever today. You can scan your phone or take your phone out and take a picture or put it open and the QR code will take it to landing page and every one of you that registered is going to get an email from our organization of how to get in there and take a look. Listen, the bottom line is this. We believe in agency success. I shared with you the number one mistake that or the mistake that agencies make, the multi million dollar mistake is not fully investing and your people, we talked about that and we don't want you to make that mistake. And again part of this is to integrate a system that has a proven plan. It gets buy in where people don't have to but they get to and to give you the absolute best return on investment you could ever experience. So I want to thank you so much for being part of this. I told you we keep this to one hour and we are just about coming up on one hour. So I want to thank you. Our team is here to help you. If you have cool questions, we're happy to help you in any way that we can. By the way, there's a number of ways you connect with us through social media obviously through LinkedIn as this is LinkedIn Live. So we'll continue to add value to you and resources. But listen, don't miss the opportunity to be with the first agency to get on the fast track and experience the ultimate success that you're looking for. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time means the world to us which the absolute best for you. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks everybody. 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 Roughness Magazine Profile Successful agencies plus keen insights from respected experts on a host of must know topics. Rough Notes Advantage plus provides the tools to help your agency grow, providing authoritative information on complex coverage issues. Visit them and learn more@roughnotes.com.